The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari airs tonight on TCM as supportive programming for The Story of Film, the 15-part documentary series about the history of world cinema.  Episode 3 covers German Expressionism, so tonight’s TCM schedule also includes F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Along with Battleship Potemkin and Citizen Kane, Dr. Caligari is a staple in many introductory film courses, including mine.  I am not exaggerating when I say that I have seen this story of a madman who manipulates a sleepwalker into killing for him well over 100 times. I was sad to discover that it is slated for 2:15am EST, forcing those who want to catch it to set their DV-Rs or other time-shifting devices. Given its importance, it deserves to kick off the evening’s programming.

THE VILLAGE OF HOLSTENWALL AS DEPICTED IN THE FILM’S EXPRESSIONIST STYLE

In text books and film courses, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is lauded as the first German Expressionist film, a distinction with several important implications. Dr. Caligari borrowed the formal characteristics of a painting movement and adapted them to the new medium of film. The emphasis on mood, monsters, and the macabre make this other worldly tale the grandfather of the horror genre, while its use of visual techniques to advance the story and suggest theme redefined the role of mise-en-scene in filmmaking. The bulk of the action in which Dr. C wreaks havoc on a small village is set in the past, but the opening and conclusion in which the main character Francis begins and ends his morbid tale takes place in the present. The scenes set in the present are known as the framing device.

Beyond the text book reasons for Dr. Caligari’s significance, which make it must-see viewing for all movie lovers, the stories surrounding the production are peculiar, adding to the film’s charm. A clear, accurate behind-the-scenes record is not possible, because contradictory anecdotal accounts by members of the creative team muddy the waters.

JANOWITZ  ENDED UP IN NEW JERSEY IN THE PERFUME BUSINESS.

No recollections are more bizarre than those of cowriter Hans Janowitz. According to Janowitz, he was first inspired to compose a tale of eerie mystery as far back as 1913, when he had a sense of foreboding regarding the war. Adding to his creepy vibe was a Hamburg murder mystery in which a young girl was killed by a fiend at a carnival or fair. In later years, Janowitz’s thoughts about the impact of that murder on his psyche varied. In some interviews, he claimed to have read about the murder in the newspaper, which compelled him to check out the crime scene and then to attend the girl’s funeral, where he got the distinct impression the killer was among them—just watching. In Siegfried Kracauer’s book The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Janowitz recalled attending the fair when he saw a young girl walk into a wooded area. The next day he was shocked to discover the girl had been killed. As in the previous version, he attended the funeral and had the eerie feeling the killer was there, too.

The murdered girl, whose name was Gertrud, continued to haunt Janowitz through WWI, where his feelings of disquiet were magnified by his experiences in the German army. He spent five and a half years in the military, hating every moment. His brother Franz, who was an aspiring poet, was killed in 1917, adding to his hatred of the military and his distrust of authority. After the war, Janowitz supposedly fell in love with an aspiring actress named Gilda Langer, a widow unable to return his feelings because of her profound sorrow at the loss of her husband in the war. According to Janowitz, Langer became the inspiration for the character Jane in Dr. Caligari.

MAYER MOVED TO LONDON, WHERE HE WROTE FOR PAUL ROTHA.

After the war, Janowitz met fellow writer Carl Mayer, who—like Hans—felt the German government was morally wrong regarding the war. Later, he told friends and colleagues that “Germany had gone mad with the misuse of power.” He did not want to go to the front or serve in battle, though a military psychiatrist was determined to send him there. Mayer spent the war attempting to prove that he was insane but to no avail. His experiences furthered his distrust of all authority figures—an attitude that began when Mayer and his siblings were tossed into the streets by their father who had gambled away the family’s money.

 
Mayer and Janowitz teamed up in the winter of 1918-1919 in Berlin to write a movie scenario that would reflect their hard-luck experiences and anti-authority attitudes. They began by telling each other their life stories and then puttering around with different ideas. With no money coming in from other writing sources, the pair sold their silver cigarette cases to pay for food. Each day, they took a break and hung out near an amusement park in the Kantstrasse. One afternoon, they stepped into the sideshow, where a man bound in heavy chains appeared to go into a stupor or a trance to tear himself free from his manacles. That night, the character of Dr. Caligari was conceived. They knew the character needed a unique and unforgettable name, so they searched through their collection of books until Janowitz found the name Caligari in Unknown Letters to Stendahl.

The scenario for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was unusual to say the least. It was born of Janowitz’s and Mayer’s personal experiences rooted in the horrors of a particularly brutal war (at least for Europeans), a personal brush with a deviant murder, and the dark side of human nature.  The format of the scenario was also peculiar: It consisted of a detailed description of every scene, including instructions for the movements of the actors as well as the overall look of the setting.

EXPRESSIONISM GAVE FILMMAKING SEVERAL MOTIFS, INCLUDING SPIRALS, WHICH MEAN CHAOS.

The pair took it to producer Erich Pommer at Decla (later Decla Bioscop). At this point, accounts of the film’s genesis begin to differ. In later years, Pommer claimed that Mayer read the entire scenario to him, which prompted him to purchase it immediately for 800 marks. Mayer and Janowitz wanted an artist named Alfred Kubin to design the sets, but Pommer was more interested in making money than in “experimentation.” Pommer claimed he asked the Decla design staff, which included Hermann Warm, to work on the set design. The decision to use a two-dimensional approach to the sets, in which lighting effects, shadows, windows, doors, backgrounds, and other details were actually painted onto backdrops was done to conserve electricity—according to Pommer decades later. He claimed Decla’s quota for power and light had been almost reached for that month, and using painted sets required less electricity. He was not thrilled with the sketches for the designs until he and Warm did a screen test, which made him realize how well they would work. However, most historians dispute Pommer’s story as nonsense. It sounds too similar to the kind of anecdotes concocted by other cantankerous filmmakers through the years because they dislike scholars and historians to interpret their work.

WERNER KRAUSS PLAYS DR. C and CONRAD VEIDT PLAYS THE SOMNAMBULIST.

In Janowitz’s version of events, he and Mayer wrote the final scenario as a challenge from Pommer after Fritz Lang suggested the producer hire Janowitz as a writer for Decla. Pommer liked the scenario so much that he paid them 6500 marks. Janowitz thought the reason that artist Alfred Kubin did not get hired for the set design was because the studio misread the name “Kubin” as “kubist,” which was German for cubist, or modernist. Thus, Hermann Warm hired painters who worked in the modern mode of Expressionism for the set design. In the least likely version of how the film’s unique set design came to be, Fritz Lang recalled in one interview that he had suggested the Expressionist style to Pommer. Lang was asked to direct The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but he declined, probably because he was scheduled to make the second or third entry in the series Die Spinnen. All versions of the story downplay Hermann Warm’s contributions, which were likely considerable because he brought in the painters Walter Reimann and Walter Rohrig to create the sets.

Lang’s influence on the set design is unlikely, but
However, the framing device subverts the writers’ original theme.  To Janowitz and Mayer, the character of Dr. Caligari was symbolic of the German state and its abuse of power or authority, while Francis and the villagers represented the victims of that abuse (not unlike Janowitz and Mayer). They were livid when they discovered that their message had been destroyed by the framing device. Janowitz always blamed Weine for the change, but Pommer and/or another producer, Rudolf Meinart, would have had to approve it. The writers complained to Decla, and threatened to bring in lawyers, but their protests were in vain. While the framing device is brilliant from a storytelling perspective, I have always felt bad for Janowitz and Mayer, who had taken their real life personal demons and re-purposed them into a statement about their times.he did make a suggestion that profoundly altered Janowitz and Mayer’s scenario. (If you are the type of person who gets bent out of shape about “spoilers,” I suggest you read no further. However, I would find it hard to believe anyone would watch this film only for the plot.) Lang told either Pommer or director Robert Wiene to add an introduction and conclusion that would place the main character, Francis, in a mental institution. The viewer does not know that the location is an asylum until the end. The fact that Francis is a mental patient casts doubt on his version of events and his perspective on Dr. Caligari. The conclusion reveals that Dr. Caligari is not a killer but a kindly psychiatrist, a story twist that contemporary filmmakers have rarely surpassed. My students never fail to be impressed with this sophisticated twist, especially considering the age of the film.

If you watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari tonight—and this is the perfect movie for insomniac night owls—try to imagine it without the framing device. What impact does Janowitz and Mayer’s version make on you? Do you think the film is more powerful with the framing device, or with the biting message about Germany?

It’s hard to conceive of Howard Hawks without sound. His films are focused on work and its downtime, and it is in spurts of chatter in which his characters define themselves. As physical as their occupations may be, it’s always their words that reveal their true selves. Which is why watching Hawks’ silent films are so disorienting. The Museum of the Moving Image is in the midst of a full retrospective of Hawks’ work, and this past weekend they screened many of his silents, including A Girl in Every Port (1928), which manages to set up many of the director’s pet themes before the arrival of sound allowed his talents to fully emerge.

After Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory? minted box office gold in 1926, the Fox Film Corporation was eager to produce more macho globetrotting comedies. Walsh’s film adapted the play by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson, which followed two army buddies, Flagg (Victor McLaglen) and Quirk (Edmond Lowe), as they battled over women in China, the Phillippines and France during the onset of WWI. Hawks wrote the original story for A Girl in Every Port in 1927, which is essentially What Price Glory? if you remove the dramatic war sections. At this early stage he’s already showing an interest in paring down genres to their basics. This reaches its apotheosis in Rio Bravo, in which the Western is reduced to a street, a jail and a hotel.  His story has two sailors, Spike (McLaglen) and Bill (Robert Armstrong), who joust over women on their worldwide jaunts, until a few brawls make them best friends. While Armstrong’s character is credited as “Salami” in the AFI Catalog, his nickname is not present in the print I saw. Maybe censors removed it for being too sexually suggestive? McLaglen is the hulking goofball, an overeager lothario whose telegraphed moves are no match for Armstrong’s low key mystery.

A number of writers were brought on to polish his scenario, but Seton Miller received the final screenplay credit. These later drafts introduced a vamp character (to be played by Louise Brooks) who seduces Spike and threatens to upend their relationship. This conventional bit of melodrama was imposed in these later drafts, over-complicating Hawks’ simple tale of friendship.

Hawks famously told Peter Bogdanovich that the film was a “love story between two men”, and his depiction of their deepening platonic bond will achieve echoes in his later work. The act of lighting cigarettes will become an erotic emblem throughout his career, seen to charged effect in To Have and Have Not. In A Girl in Every Port, this gesture seals Spike and Bill’s bond. They are both soaked after an extended throwdown with some Keystone cops and an unintended dip in a bay. Bill’s pack of cigs is all wet, so Spike proffers his – and their bond is sealed. They are shown in a simple two shot, with close-up inserts for the lighting. A classical, maximally legible setup, although Hawks does show more camera mobility that we’re used to in his later work. There is a lovely tracking shot through the city streets as the two men look for an abandoned spot to slug each other. There’s also an expressionist touch in one shot, in which Hawks uses a low angle under Louise Brooks’ high diver, her body abstracted against the night sky as she soars down towards the camera. F.W. Murnau was in residence at Fox at this time, and exerted an influence over the whole studio. Even Hawks, an exemplar of Hollywood’s “invisible” style, was inspired to deploy some  visual tricks of his own.

Louise Brooks is stuck in the role of gold digger, without the vibrant independence of later Hawks heroines. She does fill the role though, of the feminine presence that sets the professional male world on tilt, whether Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings or Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire. When he had more freedom, Hawks gave more to his female characters. In A Girl in Every Port, Brooks is a narrative device, a carnival high diver who splits Spike and Salami’s indomitable bond. But whereas Arthur and Stanwyck challenged the masculine assumptions undergirding the boys clubs they crashed, Brooks’ obvious villainy only confirms the macho worldview of A Girl in Every Port. The film ends with Spike and Salami ready to continue their love ‘em and leave ‘em life.

Hawks knew Brooks because he was friends with her husband, actor/director Eddie Sutherland. He cast her because, as he told Kevin Brownlow, “she’s very sure of herself, she’s very analytical, she’s very feminine, but she’s damn good and sure she’s going to do what she wants to do.” That could describe all of his female characters following in the wake of Brooks. While he wasn’t able to provide her with a multi-faceted character, she certainly makes a visual impression, with her razor-sharp bob and form-fitting diving gear. She exudes a fearsome modernity which scares the hell out of every man around her – the shape of Hawskian women to come. Her small but pivotal role in A Girl in Every Port attracted the attention of G.W. Pabst, who cast her as the much-desired lead in Pandora’s Box – which turned her from an actress into an immortal image.

*On Monday, September 23rd, TCM airs episode four of The Story of Film, which covers, in part, “The Great American Genres.”*

For the first half of today’s schedule on TCM, the movies of Victor Mature will be showing.  Conspicuously absent from the lineup is his most famous biblical epic, Samson and Delilah.  It’s a big, lavish, rendering of the biblical story that focuses on all the sensational spectacle one would expect from a Cecil B. DeMille production (see an earlier post from me here talking about it).  Hollywood served up biblical epics for decades before they suddenly tanked with the patrons and were removed from the bill of fare.  It’s happened before with other genres, has happened since and will happen again.  Call it “genre exhaustion.”

The biblical epic probably reached its zenith with Ben-Hur in 1959, raking in huge box office and taking home eleven Oscars.  Directed by William Wyler, with the chariot race directed by Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, and starring Charlton Heston, Ben-Hur is a sweeping story of one man’s journey from wealth to ruin, back to wealth, and finally, spiritual enlightenment.  While Judah Ben-Hur (Heston) himself is no biblical character, Jesus appears in the film as a character and gives him water.  At the end, it is the crucifixion of Jesus and the lessons of his earlier Sermon on the Mount that bring Judah around to final peace with himself and his quest for revenge.

Of course, The Ten Commandments (1956 version, d. DeMille) is a lot more fun and has much cooler, and entertaining, special effects (though Ben-Hur has that stunning chariot race).  Before that was The Robe (playing today),  the aforementioned Samson and Delilah and numerous other exciting, slightly raunchy movies made from a biblical story or, at least, connected to the Bible in some tangential way.  But all that came to an end by the late sixties.  After attempting to cover all of Genesis in The Bible: In the Beginning (1966, d. John Huston) and running through the story of the Gospels a few times as well as covering some saints, the public grew weary of a limited source.  The Gospels have limited appeal because the story is cemented, as in, there’s not much a writer can do to make the story his own.  And the Old Testament stuff, from Sampson to Moses, feels done as well.  How many times can you tell the same story over again before people get bored?

That may be why when a genre becomes the current flavor of the month, it gets stretched thin fast.  Take the current crop of action/adventure movies based on comic books.  Except for a couple of classic DC characters (Batman and Superman) and a couple of classic Marvel characters (Spiderman and the Hulk), most don’t have a lot of reboot possibilities.  Those four have been told over and over again but Iron Man?  Thor?  The Avengers?  Those feel rooted in the moment and Iron Man feels rooted in Robert Downey Jr’s performance and charisma much more than the character itself.  Eventually, after going through every minor comic book character there is, the genre will take a breather and recede out of the limelight, leaving behind only the major characters to carry the weight until the next time the genre hits it big again, which happens quite a bit.

Take the western.  That’s a genre that’s exhausted itself a couple of times but never goes away.  If you look at serials from the thirties and forties as well as main features, it might be safe to say that the western dominated the Hollywood genre through the fifties.  By the sixties, it was toning down, with the spaghetti westerns taking over from the old guard until by the seventies, there weren’t many left.  Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” kept things going, notably with The Outlaw Josey Wales, but it was clear that the heyday of westerns was decades before, in the fifties.  Until… they came back.  By the late eighties, westerns were becoming big again and, if you count Dances with Wolves as a western, even took home two Best Pictures in three years (Dances with Wolves, 1990; Unforgiven, 1992).  The genre seemed on the verge of breaking through again until around 2007, which saw the release of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, when it once again receded into the shadows of movie box office.  I trust it will return again.

One genre that reached exhaustion by the sixties that has also had a return (albeit, a mild one) is the movie musical.  Starting with the sound period, the musical steadily became bigger and bigger, from early masterworks like Love Me Tonight and Top Hat to later big-budget extravaganzas like Oklahoma and West Side Story.  Along the way Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen gave the world Singin’ in the Rain and Vincente Minnelli contributed Meet Me in St. Louis and The Band Wagon.  By the late fifties to mid-sixties, musicals meant big box office and big awards.  From 1958 to 1965, four of the eight Best Picture winners were musicals (Gigi, 1958; West Side Story, 1961; My Fair Lady, 1964; The Sound of Music, 1965).  And then?  Death.  Musicals got bigger budgets, worse reviews and no box office return.  With one huge flop after another, from Doctor Doolittle and Hello, Dolly to Paint Your Wagon and Lost Horizon, Hollywood said “no more” and the age of big musicals came to end.  Animated features continued to use the musical form and kept the torch burning until the early 2000’s, when Moulin Rouge and Chicago made the live-action musical successful again.  Even Tim Burton got into the act with an adaptation of the Broadway smash, Sweeney Todd.

Other genres go up and down in popularity but never really disappear.  Horror and sci-fi are huge one decade, barely on the radar the next.  Gangster pictures, war movies, and fantasy also swing up and down, back and forth but never disappear.  More often than not, they ebb and flow with the tide.  But some more specialized genres, like the Biblical epic, can reach genre exhaustion and never fully return.  Will that happen with the most specialized genres of today?  Hard to say but if it does, there will always be another to take its place.  Coming up with ways to make money at the box office is one idea Hollywood will never exhaust.

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On Monday, September 23rd, TCM airs episode four of The Story of Film, which covers, in part, “The Great American Genres.”

Boris Karloff & James Whale on the set of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

(Note: FRANKENSTEIN airs on TCM September 23 as part of the ongoing STORY OF FILM series)

THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) is commonly considered the best of James Whale’s two Frankenstein films and while I absolutely love Elsa Lanchester’s iconic performance as the hissing she monster, I prefer the original. There are a number of reasons why I tend to gravitate towards FRANKENSTEIN (1931) over its sequel. First and foremost, the film takes itself more seriously and in turn, it’s the scarier movie. The fog shrouded cemeteries are more eerie and the stylized sets seem more threatening. Without any notable soundtrack the film can still generate genuine fear, unease and dread in me and in this age of overwrought scores that force audiences to bend to their will, I treasure silence in my horror cinema. FRANKENSTEIN also gives more screen time to the inimitable and undervalued Dwight Frye as the mad doctor’s hunchbacked assistant, Fritz. And Boris Karloff delivers a sensational wordless performance loaded with pathos and purpose. I also must single out Colin Clive’s taut interpretation of Dr. Frankenstein, which has been repeated by lessor actors so often that it’s become much too easy to take it for granted. Don’t get me wrong, I love BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN too but over the years I’ve found myself returning to Whale’s original film more often and with each subsequent viewing I discover more things to admire.

James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN has been analyzed countless times as an intriguing tale of outsiders trying to find their rightful place in the world as well as a homosexual allegory reflecting Whale’s personal conflict with his own sexuality. While both interpretations provide viewers with a lot of fascinating food for thought, in recent years I’ve come to appreciate the film as a WWI parable that reflects Whale’s own experiences during the Great War as a second lieutenant in the British Army.

As readers may or may not know, Whale came from a working class family and fought his way through the ranks to become an Army lieutenant. His military career was cut short in 1917 when he was captured by German soldiers on the blood soaked Western Front and he spent the rest of WWI in a prisoner-of-war camp. During his lengthy imprisonment Whale divided his time between directing, writing, producing and starring in his own theatrical plays in an attempt to entertain his fellow troops and when the war ended he decided to pursue a career on stage. His directing talents eventually landed him in Hollywood and in 1931 Universal offered him a 5-year directing contract. Whale’s first film for Universal was the WWI drama WATERLOO BRIDGE (1931) and it was warmly received by audiences as well as critics.  Universal studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr. was so impressed with the success of WATERLOO BRIDGE that he offered Whale the chance to choose his own directing project next and Whale selected FRANKENSTEIN. The rest, as they say, is history. Although Whale’s career in Hollywood was short lived, he made a number of important and impressive films after FRANKENSTEIN including THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932), THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933), BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), SHOW BOAT (1936) and the highly controversial antiwar film THE ROAD BACK (1937), which was butchered by Universal before its wide release under pressure from Hitler’s government. This hostile falling out led to Whale permanently parting ways with Universal and he finally retired from filmmaking in 1941 at the age of 52, just 10 short years after making FRANKENSTEIN.

Looking back at James Whale’s career now, it’s hard not to feel cheated. He had some amazing successes in those brief 10 years but in some ways the young, bright British lieutenant never really left the trenches. When Universal started taking film editing suggestions from the German government he must have felt as if his old war enemies had followed him to Hollywood. The Great War, career disappointments, mounting health concerns and a number of personal problems finally caught up to Whale in 1957 and he committed suicide by diving into the shallow end of a pool. His death was tragic and deeply unfortunate but the films he left behind offer us a window into his troubled world. On its murky surface FRANKENSTEIN isn’t a WWI drama but it’s possible to catch a glimpse of Whale’s shell-shocked sensibility revealing itself in this remarkably dark and thoughtful film.

Top: Soldiers digging trenches in WW1 Bottom: A scene from FRANKENSTEIN

FRANKENSTEIN opens with a macabre scene inside a cemetery. Mourners are laying someone to rest but Dr. Frankenstein and Fritz soon emerge from the shadows to dig up the corpse. As they begin to bury their shovels into the jagged uneven ground it’s easy to imagine the two men on a battle ground digging trenches. Did Whale want viewers to make that connection? I don’t know for certain but that moment is followed by another scene involving a hanging corpse. Hangings were commonplace during WWI. Deserters and spies were regularly hung and in some cases mass hangings were used as a form of fatal torture to deter the enemy. When Whale wasn’t fighting for his life inside the trenches it’s possible that he witnessed a hanging or its consequences. Of course the terrain similarities aren’t exactly coincidental. Whale reportedly used Universal’s original set from ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1931) during the making of FRANKENSTEIN as well as THE INVISIBLE MAN but one has to wonder if that was intentional on his part? Whale had a lot of control over the production of his early films so I suspect that he was aware of the affect that this might have on audiences. Conscious of it or not, Whale brought Mary Shelley’s gothic tale up-to-date by linking it to the horrors of modern warfare.

The resurrection themes that run through FRANKENSTEIN must have also appealed to a man who had witnessed war. As Dr. Christiane Gerblinger points out in her intriguing essay, James Whale Frankensteins: Reanimating the Great War, young men in Britain entered WWI with an almost blind sense of duty and a naiveté. They assumed that they were immune to death or somehow immortal. Of course this wasn’t the case and millions died during one of the world’s bloodiest conflicts. But the idea of sacrificing oneself to the greater good was ever present in WWI and a soldier’s death was commonly greeted with appreciation and applause. Dr. Frankenstein’s desperate quest to reanimate the dead must be easy to sympathize with if you’ve been witness to the massive and indiscriminate loss of life that occurs on a battlefield. It’s possible that Whale’s own anti-war feelings as well as his innate desire to reunite with dead comrades influenced his decision to make FRANKENSTEIN.

One of the most remarkable scenes in FRANKENSTEIN is the horrific and tragic murder of little Maria (Marilyn Harris). The man made monster has our pity when he reaches out to the young girl and takes her hand. We’ve already witnessed him being rejected by his maker and we’ve seen him tortured by the fire wielding Fritz. He’s clearly fighting his own personal battle but the monster seems victorious and free of malice during his playful interaction with Maria until he thoughtlessly throws her in the lake and she sinks like a stone. The monster clumsily attempts to save her but it’s too late and he stumbles into the woods staring at his own scarred hands in disbelief. He seems to be following orders from some unseen commander and in that incredibly grim but divinely beautiful moment the audience is faced with the horrific task of sympathizing with a child killer. Is the monster supposed to resemble a shell-shocked solider whose actions are motivated by trauma? James Whale knew that the men and women who fight our wars rarely walk away unscarred. He was also well aware of the fact that children are often the casualties of war even if they’re not the intended target. Little Maria could be a sad symbol of all the innocent lives lost in WWI or she could just be the monster’s most sympathetic victim. There is no right or wrong answer. James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN is open to all kinds of interpretations but it can also simply be enjoyed and appreciated as one of Universal’s greatest horror films. It’s a classic monster movie that keeps on giving and you can catch it on TCM when it airs on September 23 in association with the ongoing STORY OF FILM series.

The other day, while doing non-Morlock duty for Turner Classic Movies, I had occasion to write about the 1950 RKO Radio Pictures crime/trial drama HUNT THE MAN DOWN. This was Gig Young’s first starring role, after an apprenticeship serving and supporting the manly likes of Errol Flynn, John Wayne, and Barbara Stanwyck. You probably have not seen the film — not many people have these days — and in fact the picture itself is not really germane to my topic today. No, it’s just the poster I’m interested in. It’s textbook noir stuff, with tense, fearful faces ringing Young (cast as a crusading defense attorney out to clear the name of presumably wrongly convicted killer James Anderson — later the quite horrible Bob Ewell of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD) and lots of one-sheet hyperbole — standard issue. What makes the poster of particular interest to me is that Young is shooting laserbeams out of his eyes and melting the dude in the lower right hand corner. (Beat.) Okay, so those aren’t really laserbeams coming out of Gig Young’s eyes. I guess that luminous cone is meant to evoke a flashlight or searchlight, with the idea being that the light symbolizes Young’s vigilance, his diligence, and his hardwired connection to truth and justice. Why the light is melting (or seems to be melting — not really sure what’s going on there) is a question for another day. When I posted this onesheet on my Facebook page, my friend, film critic and blogger Marty McKee, commented “Gig Young shooting death rays from his face would make this film the best ever.” Indeed, it would. But the movie isn’t called MELT THE MAN DOWN, it’s called HUNT THE MAN DOWN, and in it, you will find, Gig Young plays a regular human being lawyer without the ability to cut the ether with laser eyes. It’s a worthwhile picture, to be sure, but you should go into it with the understanding that at no point during its running time will a human being be reduced to ash. You’ll enjoy yourself more if you accept that that expectation will never be met. Still, HUNT THE MAN DOWN offers us an intriguing variation on what had been, for many years at the movies, a recurring trend in the hawking of motion pictures: the often unfulfilled promise of laser eyes.

You can blame Frankenstein for all of this. Or, rather, Frankenstein’s monster. Or, more accurately, Universal Studios, who attempted to drum up advance interest in their 1931 FRANKENSTEIN — then slated to star Bela Lugosi — by depicting the monster (who resembles, for some occult reason, Francis Lederer) as a city-smashing, subway service-disrupting, stomping the terra (and various pedestrians) titan, picking puny folks up in his giant mitt (and this two years before the advent of KING KONG) and shooting laserbeams out of his eyes. Can you imagine if James Whale had taken the film in this direction? But he didn’t, and perhaps one of the biggest stumbling blocks for him in considering this approach (which he never did, but play along anyway) is that the laser had not yet been invented. Oh, sure, brainiacs from all points of the compass had been tossing out ideas related to Max Planck’s law of radiation, among them Albert Einstein, Rudolph Landenberg, and Valentin Fabrikant (best name ever?), and to the theory of stimulated emission but the laserbeam as we know it lay far ahead in the future, as much true science fiction in 1931 as cellphone technology and twerking. The first laser was not operational until 1960… so how come, you’re thinking, can Frankenstein’s monster have laserbeams shooting out of his eyes? We probably have H. G. Wells to thank for that. In Wells’ seminal alien invasion tale The War of the Worlds (first published in 1898), the Martian interlopers use a “heat-ray” to make their human targets, uh… shall we say more pliable. Early illustrations from the Wells novel played up the heat-ray, chilling readers with the possibilities of mass destruction at the flip of a switch. In Paris, pioneer French filmmaker Rene Clair made THE CRAZY RAY (1925), about a madman who sets up shop atop the Eiffel Tower with a device that renders the City of Lights immobile. These were mere flights of fancy, speculative what-ifs, as madass for their day as the idea of stitching together a synthetic man from random bodyparts and animating the whole shebang with lightning.
Boris Karloff, as we all know, got the role of the monster in FRANKENSTEIN while Bela Lugosi made himself useful elsewhere. And Karloff’s take on the Monster was crafted entirely without benefit of laser technology, eschewing instead an old school Gothic aesthetic that was etched in stark contrast to the film’s apocalyptic advance word. And yet when Universal paired Karloff and Lugosi for the first time, the old laser eyes came back out… albeit courtesy of the title creature in THE BLACK CAT (1934). Again, hyperbole wins out over truth in advertising on this onesheet for the film, as Boris and Bela’s heads do not at any point in the otherwise excellent film, I am sorry to say, career about on their own through the air while shooting out exhaust fumes, that the cat in question is not 12 feet high, and that it does not shoot lasers out of its eyes that render women senseless and open to suggestion. Yet however much we may decry THE BLACK CAT as a devious bait-and-switch, denying us as it does laser eyes and amazing colossal cats, it does represent (correct me if I’m wrong) the beginning of what we might call a popular movie poster meme, one that stretched from the early sound era well into the 1960s. Once moviegoers accepted the fact that they would not be seeing literal laser beam eyes in movies of that era, once everyone accustomed themselves to the empty promise, I think they all had a bit of fun. Obviously, if there had been riots in protest (“We want more laser eyes!” said no one, because lasers hadn’t been invented yet), then the Hollywood studios would not have kept putting laser eyes in movie posters. The populace grew so fond of the affectation, it seems to be, that movie poster artists were afraid not to use them.

How else is one to explain the use of lasers shooting out of Boris Karloff’s eyes (to say nothing of his giant, green, Oz-like head) in THE BLACK ROOM (1935). In this Columbia release, Karloff plays, not a supernatural entity or verdigris behemoth, but a regular dude. Actually, two regular dudes, as he plays identical twins from the 18th Century, one good, one evil. Neither twin has mesmeric abilities, let alone the power to melt stuff ocularly. So it’s just a thing, clearly, a style to which Hollywood grew accustomed and with which the America movie-going public expected.
The funny thing is that movies about weird-eye dudes, specifically about characters with genuine hypnotic powers who can influence the minds of others and bend them to their respective wills, never got the laser beam eyes treatment in their posters. Not THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920), not SVENGALI (1931), not THE MAD GENIUS (1931), not WHITE ZOMBIE (1932); the best the posters for these films could offer was show big, wide, unblinking eyes, which just isn’t the same as eyes that can shoot laserbeams, it just isn’t. And yet THE DEVIL DOLL (1936), which is about a former banker and Devil’s Island escapee (Lionel Barrymore, brother of John Barrymore, star of both SVENGALI and THE MAD GENIUS, interestingly enough) who obtains a people shrinking device that enables him to render his false accusers the size of Bratzillas, is end-to-end/collar to cuffs abjectly laserless — yet it goes with the laser eyes on its poster. It’s unclear from the evidence at hand (at the left) precisely whose eyes those are supposed to represent — Barrymore’s, or those of his partner in crime, Rafaella Ottiano. The implication is, of course, plain as day: the producers wanted moviegoers to believe that somebody in THE DEVIL DOLL would have the ability to shrink people by dint of laserbeam eyes. And that, gentle reader, never happens. It’s never even a discussion.

It was the same shell game when it came time to promote DOCTOR CYCLOPS (1940), starring Albert Dekker as — a guy who can shoot lasers out from behind his Coke bottle eyeglasses? No. As a scientist who can, here we go again, shrink people to a fraction of their original size and then smother them with cottonballs (as needed). Unlike THE DEVIL DOLL, there is a laser in DOCTOR CYCLOPS, or at least a beam, but it’s purely comet-based and mechanical in its dispensation and the process is nothing like the poster suggests.
Aha! THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1950)… finally a movie that earns the laser eyes in its poster because someone in the movie really has laser beam eyes. Namely Gort, the robot depicted at the right, who has not proper eyes but a visor and out of that visor shoots a highly concentrated beam of light that can make guns really hot and seriously turn on leading lady Patricia Neal. (Watch it again and look closely… she is seriously and profoundly turned in an obvious mouth-breathing/noticeable panting way on by Gort’s laser eyes — and what woman in her right mind wouldn’t be?) THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL is class A, forward-looking, and trendsetting. I think it is safe to speculate that the whole empty promise of laser beams eyes in movie posters for movies without laser beam eyes would have petered out by this time were it not for THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, which found an actual application for laser beam eyes that encompassed far more than heating up military sidearms and working up repressed Eisenhower era women into an obvious lather. In no time at all, The Beam Was Back. In the posters for THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS (1955), laser beams shoot out of the eyes of hero John Agar, a regular Joe who has been possessed by an alien entity and given the ability to make commercial aircraft plummet to earth (albeit not via laser beam eyes but by ET telepathy). In 1959, in issue 127 of DC Comics’ Superman, a giant ape (“More fantastic than King Kong!”) named Titano has eyes that shoot krypton rays, which prove to be problematic for the Man of Steel…
… meanwhile in Japan, look who’s makin’ laser eyes at me! Not King Kong, mind you, but Mechni-Kong, a robot simulacrum of the 8th Wonder of the World who appears in Toho’s KING KONG ESCAPES (1967), a sequel to KING KONG VERSUS GODZILLA (1962). In the earlier film, Kong had to contend with an opponent who could belch fire breath; for the follow-up, and with Godzilla conspicuous in his absence, the producers gave Kong’s rival, Mechani-Kong, a head-mounted laser, which posters for the film passed off as, of course, laser beam eyes. Thirty years beyond FRANKENSTEIN and THE BLACK CAT, the movies were still promising eye lasers they had no indention of delivering and yet it was all in good fun, of course (longstanding nerdman resentments notwithstanding). I’m not going to go so far as to say that KING KONG ESCAPES brought the laser beam tradition to a grinding halt but I’d be hard pressed to think of a movie poster post-1967 that employs the device. Shit got real after 1968 and posters reflected a vogue for verisimilitude, for minimalism, for grit and gravity. (Funny, isn’t it, that only after laser technology was a possibility that laser beams were dropped from movie posters as suddenly being beyond the realm of the possible.) Even movies about Superman, who has laser beam eyes, made from 1978 onwards forfeited the opportunity to exploit that ability in posters. To everything there is a season, I once read in some book (probably a Stephen King book, possibly Different Seasons) and what the movies have lost the Internet has gained in a thriving laser beam eyes meme that really delivers on the old Andy Warhol chestnut that in the future everybody will have laser beam eyes.

“Damn your eyes!”

“Too late.”

From September and on for the next several months, on Mondays and Tuesdays TCM is airing a sprawling and ambitious multipart documentary called The Story of Film. As you have may have sussed out by now, this is a somewhat controversial program–in large measure because of its rather jaundiced view of classical Hollywood genre filmmaking. For an audience that watches TCM regularly, and finds leisure time to visit a TCM-sponsored classic movie blog like this, Story of Film‘s stance isn’t likely to find many happy supporters.

That being said, there’s a lot about Hollywood genres that is worth revisiting, challenging, and interrogating. There is too much received wisdom that has calcified around certain subjects, creating preconceptions that get in the way of being able to engage with these films in a fresh and clear-eyed way. And so, seen from that perspective, creator Mark Cousins’ approach represents an opportunity to explode some unhelpful conventional wisdom…

When it comes to silent comedy, though, he blows past that opportunity, managing to be simultaneously vaguely hostile to Hollywood’s classic era while also being uncritical about what it meant. Here’s what he says about silent comedy in the book version of Story of Film: “Silent American cinema’s greatest genre, comedy, had changed course at the beginning of the sound era and the fates of its director-stars were varied.”  Yup, there it is again–that old canard about silent comedy being distinct from talkie comedy, and superior–treating 1928 as some kind of Rubicon.

As longtime readers of mine know, I am a committed and even obsessive fan of American silent comedy, but I am also deeply skeptical of the received wisdom about what the contours of this genre are.

The first thing we have to grapple with is that as a genre, posterity and received wisdom treats American silent comedy in a fundamentally weird fashion.

In general, silent films as a whole are treated as something apart from the rest of classic films. TCM rarely incorporates silent films into the main schedule, choosing to segregate silent films into special programming blocks. And this is consistent with how audiences approach silent films–there is a specialty sub-audience of silent film fans who not only enjoy silents but specifically enjoy silents over talkies, and seek them out because they are silent, whereas the general classic film audience (the general TCM audience) is more willing to sit through Casablanca than Sunrise. But aside from that basic prejudice, there isn’t any additional effort to discriminate within silent film genres:

You could show F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu back to back with Tod Browning’s Dracula and know the same audience would enjoy both equally. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is a direct precursor to talkie science fiction, and it’s not unreasonable for Roger Ebert to compare Dark City to Metropolis and expect the audience to enjoy both on the same level. John Ford’s silent Westerns are still Westerns–there is no meaningful distinction of “silent Westerns.”

But… when it comes to silent comedy, there is a distinction drawn between silent and talkie comedy, and not only that but a common critical stance taken that the silent form is superior to the talkie form–and that fans of one will be a different sort than fans of the other.

Certainly there are easily recognizable attributes of silent comedy that distinguish it from talkie comedy: a predilection for the balletic and acrobatic kinds of physical slapstick, in films where the absence of sound focuses attention on visual gags. Supposedly the absence of sound allows for kinds of physical or visual humor that would be undermined by sound, cheapened by talk, and/or made leaden by the 24 fps frame rate of sound film.

To which I say: phooey.

The very existence of silent comedy is an almost inexplicable anomaly. It is not as if the traditions of comedy had been leading towards this. George Bernard Shaw did not go to bed at night wishing he could jettison all the dang words from his plays. Quite the contrary, at the moment that the movies came into being, nearly every form of comedy you could encounter in any media was centered around words.

The only meaningful tradition of “silent” comedy that predates the birth of the movies was the history of clowning. There is a line of thought that seeks to define the silent comedies of the 1910s and 1920s as a modern reinterpretation of clowning traditions. There is a respectable argument to made on this count, but you won’t find it from me.

My resistance to that line of thinking is simple: whatever common ground you may find between silent “clowns” and their non-movie antecedents are mostly coincidental. A rhinoceros looks like a triceratops not because they share any close relatives but because they independently evolved to live in similar environments.

If silent comedy cinema was truly just a new medium by which to explore existing traditions of clowning, then you’d expect the great silent clowns to actually be clowns, to have come from a clowning background. You’d expect the filmmakers to be turning to the history of clowning for inspirations for their films. Basically, you’d expect exactly the opposite of what the history of slapstick actually was.

Silent cinema poached its comedians from vaudeville more than any other source–that is, from a tradition of live comedy that was heavily dependent on puns, dialect comedy, songs, and other forms of wordplay. The very word “slapstick” refers to the mechanism to produce a sound effect to accompany on-stage comic violence that punters in the back row could hear.

There were the occasional silent comedians who came from unambiguous clowning backgrounds (Poodles Hanneford I’m looking at you), but the field was absolutely dominated by comedians who came from vaudeville, not the circus.

Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon were stage stars before they filmed a single frame, and their stage acts were not silent. Charley Chase started out with a primarily musical act built around his singing. Billy Bevan came from Australia’s music hall traditions. The prominent comedy stars who didn’t come from vaudeville or music halls just came straight to the movies (see Harold Lloyd for example), they didn’t start as clowns.

And during these early stage careers, the men (and women) who would become the great silent comedians weren’t trying to excise dialogue from their acts. They happily incorporated dialog comedy and other sounds into their physical comedy acts naturally–and only jettisoned the words when the technology forced them to.

When the first silent comedy features were made, the filmmakers drew from source material from the legitimate stage and from literature–from essentially “talkie” sources.

Placed before the silent cameras, however, these men and their contemporaries had to improvise and adapt. Whatever performing skills they may have honed on the vaudeville stage had to be warped to suit the limitations of silent cinema. And this they just happened to do better than anyone else. They had competitors and peers, and some of those competitors and peers tried alternate approaches to adapting to the silent screen. Some are better remembered than others today.

Put another way: many different kinds of artists tried different kinds of screen comedy in the silent era, and some of these were more successful than others–they are the ones that have been remembered and celebrated. But we shouldn’t assume by that result that their style of physical slapstick was somehow predetermined.

The Marx Brothers, WC Fields, and Will Rogers all made silent comedies–but their particular approach to comedy did not adapt to the silent form very well. Their silent films are poorly remembered if at all, and they found their fame later when they could deploy words to their advantage, as had generations of comedians before them.

The era of silent comedy is an anomaly, a side effect caused by technological limitations of early cinema. The overwhelming commercial success and lasting cultural importance of a handful of silent comedians is not merely coincidental with the development of silent comedy as an art form–it is the same thing.

If the defining feature of silent comedy is is silence, then we are talking about a twenty year cycle firmly bounded at both ends by technological advances. But if we acknowledge that the key figures of silent comedy emerged from non-silent comic traditions, and that their silent work was in many ways an accident of history, we not only have the privilege of conflating silent and talkie comedies into a single history, we are also better situated to recognize just how astonishing their silent accomplishments really were.

Within four years he filmed three acclaimed shorts and one feature that would later be hailed a masterpiece – only to die on October 5th, 1934, at the age of 29, from rheumatic septicaemia. Jean Vigo’s short life had been plagued by health problems, including an affliction of tuberculosis he got eight years earlier in 1926. Here’s something you probably shouldn’t do if you’ve suffered tuberculosis: spend three months during a particularly harsh winter shooting a story about barge dwellers on location, outdoors, on water, in the rain, snow, and fog. These extreme circumstances combined with the debilitating nature of an intensive and frenetic shooting schedule contributed to the young, frail director contracting the illness that would eventually kill him a few months after filming was completed. Adding insult to injury, the director was too weak from his illness to protest the mutilations that distributors inflicted on his first, and tragically, only feature film: L’Atalante.

How severe were the changes? For starters, the original audience that saw the film when it opened in September of 1934 at the Colisée cinema, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, were introduced to the film not as L’Atalante, but rather as Le Chaland qui passe. This translates into “The Passing Barge,” and was also a hit song of the time by Lys Gauty, one that exhibitors insisted on inserting into the film to help its commercial prospects. That might seem a small change, but changing the title of the film from the name of the barge to something so literal-minded smacks of a commercial instinct hoping to cash in on a pop hit, and is at odds with the more poetic sensibility clearly on display in Vigo’s work. In modern terms it would be like having the studio add a Daft Punk song to your film and then calling the film Get Lucky. It’s also worth noting that this ploy didn’t help the films bottom-line. Despite some favorable reviews, this shortened and commercialized version of Vigo’s film sank away and seemed destined for obscurity.

The title change was only one of many changes made to the film, and if there is any consolation to be had from the director’s failing health, it’s that he was forced to stay in bed for the three weeks that the truncated 65 minute version of his original 89 minute film was being screened. As fate would have it, Le Chaland qui passe was screening at the Adyar cinema on the afternoon of Vigo’s burial into the Bagneux cemetery on October 8th, 1934. But as fate would also have it, L’Atalante would reappear in October of 1940, with Le chaland qui passe removed from the soundtrack as well as the title – but this was still a shortened version of the original.

With the original negative mysteriously missing, and a sudden resurgence of interest in the work of Jean Vigo thanks, at first, to the French Federation of Film Clubs and, later, to the efforts of various industry notables seeking to resurrect Vigo’s career, the number of versions of L’Atalante one could find were confined only to the number of prints that had circulated around the world. Thankfully, Gaumont had accidentally sent a 1934 copy of L’Atalante, instead of Le Chaland qui passe, to London. This overlooked print then drifted into the vaults of the NFTVA warehouse in Berkhamstead, and was crucial to the 1990s restoration by Jean-Louis Bompoint and Pierre Philippe. In 2001 other changes were introduced in a renovation by Bernard Eisenschitz and Luce Vigo, which sought less to be a comprehensive restoration using all available and found material and, instead, a restoration that honed down the elements to what they imagined Vigo’s had originally intended for the screen.

Many of the actors were personal friends of Vigo (Jean Dasté, Gilles Margaritis, Fanny Clar, Raphael Diligent), but Michel Simon (Boudu sauvé des eaux, aka: Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932) was already well established, as was Dita Parlo (who had a contract with Ufa and also did some work for Hollywood). Cameraman Boris Kaufman deserves a special shout out. The brother of Dziga Vertov, Kaufman has the kind of illustrious career that puts him in a small pantheon of accomplished cinematographers, going on to shoot things like On the Waterfront (1954), Baby Doll (1955), 12 Angry Men (1957), and many other great films.

Vigo’s final resting place was in the same cemetery that his father, anarchist Miguel Alemereyda, had been buried in 17 years earlier after being mysteriously murdered in prison (he was strangled by his shoelaces). His wife, Lydou Vigo joined this final resting place on April 24th, 1939, also passing away at a young age, she was 30-years-old. Jean had met Lydou (aka: Elisabeth Lozinska) at a tubercular clinic and it was thanks to the marriage dowry he received by Lydou’s father that Jean was able to buy a camera to make his first film, À propos de Nice (About Nice, 1930). His second short, Taris, roi de l’eau (Taros, King of the Water, 1931), was a documentary about French swimmer Jean Taris. But what followed next,  a 44-minute condemnation of boarding schools called Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933), was such a clear indictment of authority that it was censored in France until after WWII. For those interested in a cool double-feature, you could watch Zéro de conduite and follow that with a screening of Lindsay Anderson’s If…. (1968), which was a conscious tribute to the former. As to L’Atalante, I’d recommend making it a triple-feature by adding Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) and a film by the director who just made big waves with Holy Moters last year, Leo Carax’sThe Lovers on the Bridge (1991).

L’Atalante screens on TCM this coming Tuesday, September 24th.

Though they rarely win awards or accolades, genre films have always driven Hollywood filmmaking. Formulaic and repetitive by nature, genres work by meeting audience expectations, because viewers find comfort, entertainment, and satisfaction in the familiar. The trick to good genre filmmaking is to balance between the old and the new, the familiar and the unexpected. Keeping genres interesting to viewers requires tweaking, updating, adjusting, or even subverting a genre’s formula or conventions. Efforts to completely re-invent a genre will likely result in box office failure, while refusing to tweak, adjust, or update can make a genre seem dull or worn out (see fellow Morlock Greg Ferrara’s recent post). One way to enliven a genre is to combine it with another genre or story trend. Sometimes that proves innovative (film noir and sci fi in Blade Runner); sometimes it seems cobbled together like Frankenstein’s monster (western and sci fi in Cowboys & Aliens).

I recently re-watched the 1945 comedy Murder, He Says, a childhood favorite that I have always found peculiar. Watching it again made me realize that it is the movie’s odd mix of genres and story trends that is appealing and, ultimately, amusing. Much of the success of Murder, He Says is dependent on star Fred MacMurray, whose everyman persona and exquisite timing are assets to any genre. MacMurray plays Pete Marshall, an employee of the Trotter Poll (like the Gallup Poll) whose job entails interviewing rural folks about their lifestyles. Do you have electricity, running water, radio, a refrigerator, he asks one resident at the local general store. “What do you think we are, hicks?,” replies the bewhiskered man in his slouch hat and overalls.

MR. JOHNSON (Porter Hall), PETE (Fred MacMurray), MERT OR BERT (Peter Whitney), and MA (Marjorie Main) TRY TO FIGURE OUT EACH OTHER.

Pete Marshall is also searching for fellow Trotter pollster Hector P. Smedley, who disappeared near the Fleagle farm located deep in the backwoods. Pete manages to find the isolated Fleagle farm, but his arrival just after dark sparks suspicions among the family, who don’t cotton to strangers under any circumstances. Ma Fleagle, who prefers to go by Mrs. Fleagle Smithers Johnson because she has been married three times, keeps order among her brood by cracking a bullwhip. Ma Fleagle is played by Marjorie Main, who would introduce her most well-known character, Ma Kettle, in The Egg and I two years later. Wearing a similar cotton dress with her hair an untidy nest on her head, Ma Fleagle is the dark doppelganger of Ma Kettle. Despite his efforts, Pete can’t seem to escape the dilapidated Fleagle house and finds himself entangled in a family secret, attracted to a pretty girl in disguise, and menaced by an escaped convict on the lam.

COSTAR HELEN WALKER  HAD PROBLEMS MASTERING THE SOUTHERN ACCENT DESPITE HELP FROM A SPEECH PROFESSOR.

Murder, He Says blends the old dark house subgenre with a backwoods comedy—an unlikely but winning combination. The Fleagles are as peculiar as the Femms in James Whale’s 1932 gothic classic The Old Dark House and harbor just as many secrets. Ma’s oversized twin sons, Mert and Bert Fleagle, are simultaneously dimwitted and menacing. The only way to tell them apart is to whomp one of them in the back. Bert has a crick in his lower back: So, if he keels over, it’s Burt; if he only gets mad, it’s Mert. Bert and Mert were played by Peter Whitney, a character actor whose career thrived in the 1940s and 1950s. The special effects that allowed Whitney to simultaneously appear as both brothers in the same frame are so convincing that I thought they were played by a pair of real-life siblings. Jean Heather costars as Elany Fleagle, a child-woman who is obviously “touched,” as they say in the South. Elany is the creepiest character in the film, whether she is pouting like a little girl because she can’t run her hands through Pete’s curly hair, or singing her haunting nonsense song, “Flizon horzis, Beezin komzis, Onches nobis, Inob keezis.” The latter is a clue to a hidden fortune on the Fleagle farm. The connection to the old-dark-house subgenre becomes readily apparent when Ma’s third husband, Mr. Johnson, pops up from a trap door in the floor of the living room. Everyone (even Ma) refers to the little man as Mr. Johnson, who has an M.A., a Ph.D., and a medical degree and likes to experiment with radioactive substances. In other words, he is the equivalent of the “mad scientist” concocting unusual creations in the cellar. The Fleagles and Mr. Johnson are trying to finagle Grandma Fleagle out of the family fortune before dispatching her with some of Mr. Johnson’s radioactive poison.  Grandma glows in the dark like a Christmas tree, just like the dog that Pete saw in the woods on the way to the Fleagle farm.

THE CHARACTERS TRY TO AVOID THE RADIOACTIVE GRAVY.

Rustic rural characters and storylines became a trend in Hollywood during World War II and continued throughout the decade. Examples of this story trend or subgenre included everything from John Ford’s Tobacco Road (1941) to comedies like The Egg and I (1947) to musicals such as Feudin’ Rhythm. Fueling the trend were b-movies featuring comedienne Judy Canova, who brought her hayseed persona from vaudeville and radio to the big screen in such comedies as Joan of Ozark (1942), Sleepy Lagoon (1943), and Louisiana Hayride (1944). The characters Ma and Pa Kettle stole the movie The Egg and I from stars Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert, so Kettle actors Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride received their own b-movie series beginning in 1949. Combining a rustic comedy with the old dark house formula doesn’t seem so odd considering the context.

Unfortunately, most of the films exploit the negative stereotypes of rural Southerners. The Fleagles are “real hillbillies” as one of the characters notes, a word that makes my skin crawl when it is used outside the rural South. The Fleagles live in a dilapidated frame house in the backwoods, with cow skulls decorating the walls. When Pete notices the unusual décor, Ma pipes up, “Purty, ain’t it.” None of the Fleagle offspring are normal: Mert and Bert are easily outsmarted, while Elaney is the comic version of the banjo-playing kid in Deliverance.  I was relieved to discover that the most immoral character in the film is the Yankee outsider, the over-educated Mr. Johnson.

MY FAVORITE SCENE: PETE’S BODY AND MERT (OR BERT’S) LEGS.

Like most old dark house movies, the action takes place almost entirely in one location, and the frightening Fleagle farm becomes a carnival fun house of secret passageways, dark cellars, and rickety rooms. This rural version of the old dark house offers ample opportunity for the two “normal” characters, Pete Marshall and Claire Mathews (played by Helen Walker), to stumble into trouble around every corner. The peculiarities of each room make for a unique setting for various comic situations.  During a dinner scene at a round table that is a really a big lazy Susan, the characters play a game of hot potato as they try to avoid eating grits that have been covered in radioactive gravy. Each finds an excuse to spin the table so as to move the offending gravy out of their way, until no one can remember which plate is the “hot” one. In the cellar, Pete subdues Bert or Mert in the potato bin, with the twin’s feet sticking out over the edge. When someone catches him, he plops down on the twin in a position that makes it look like it is his feet sticking out of the bin. Every time the twin moans or kicks, Pete pretends as though it is his legs twitching. The sequence is MacMurray’s best comic scene.

Murder, He Says is not currently on the TCM schedule, but it is paired with another “hicks pic,” Feudin’, Fussin’ and a-Fightin’ on DVD.

In 2009 The New Zealand Project was initiated, a collaboration between the New Zealand Film Archive, the National Film Preservation Foundation and private collectors to preserve and distribute American films housed in the NZFA’s vaults. They had stacks of American nitrate prints that had gone untouched for years, since the NZFA had focused their efforts on preserving their local film history. In 2010 nitrate experts Leslie Lewis and Brian Meacham were sent to investigate their holdings and assess which titles were most in need of help. What they discovered was astonishing, a cache of presumably “lost” films, including John Ford’s Upstream and the first three reels of The White Shadow, for which Alfred Hitchcock was the assistant director, editor, scenarist and art director. In total 176 films were shipped to the U.S. for preservation. Many of these rescued titles are streaming on the National Film Preservation Foundation website, and today the NFPF released a DVD with some highlights of this trove. “Lost and Found: American Treasures From the New Zealand Film Archive” includes the Ford and Hitchcock features, as well as a selection of shorts and newsreels that haven’t been seen since their original release over 90 years ago. TCM will air a selection of these titles on November 17th and 24th.

 John Ford’s theatrical rooming house comedy Upstream (1927) is the centerpiece, an ingratiating charmer about the everyday performances of down at heel actors. As the film’s epigraph says, “If life in general is a play, then a theatrical boarding house is a burlesque show.” I already wrote about Upstream and The White Shadow (1924) in this space before, though, so today I’ll be focusing on the shorts and newsreels that fill out the package, and they contain multifarious charms of their own.

Lyman H. Howe’s Famous Ride on a Runaway Train (1921) is a literal thrill ride, as the camera puts the viewer at the head of a train seemingly careening into oblivion. Paired with the film’s soundtrack disc of clanging clamor, which was fortuitously held by the Library of Congress, it still retains its adrenaline jolting power. When an inter-title instructs you to, “Hold on to your seats! The train is running away”, it is impossible to disobey.

Birth of a Hat (1920) is a promotional short which tracks the production of Stetson’s fine felt hats from scrambling hares to topping the hair on your head. The company’s honesty about its commodity chain is a far cry from today’s manufacturers, whose processes are only revealed today through investigative reporting or muckraking documentarians. No muck was raked in The Love Charm (1928) a one-reel exoticized Polynesian romance shot as an excuse to test two-strip Technicolor.

One of the recurring themes in the set is the increasing freedom of women. From the girl riding in an ostrich-drawn carriage in a tabloid Selznick Newsreel to serial heroine Dolly of the Dailies (1914) to writer-director-star Mabel Normand, women were flamboyantly asserting their strength. In addition to the ostrich ride, the newsreels include a “Co-operative Weekly Review” (1918) that features high-school girls learning war-time trades of carpentry and steel smelting, as well as a call for 25,000 Red Cross nurses. The set includes Episode #5 of the Edison Dolly series, entitled, ” The Chinese Fan”. The early silent period featured an explosion of plucky young female leads, from The Perils of Pauline to The Hazards of Helen. These cliffhanging crime-solvers are far more progressive figures than any of todays leading ladies (Milla Jovovich excepted). As embodied by Mary Fuller, Dolly is an ambitious young NYC reporter who gets caught up in dangerous scrapes. In this episode she infiltrates a Chinese gang (grim stereotype opium addicts), and rescues the kidnapped daughter of a local banker. Clearly shot on the fly, the short also acts as an inadvertent documentary of its making. In one revealing shot, a horse and carriage fire truck races out of a garage, but two men nearby are staring at the camera. As the horses race off, both tip their caps toward the lens, a friendly gesture that still warms the heart 100 years on.

Won in a Cupboard (1914) is the second film directed by Mabel Normand, and the earliest to survive. Only 21 at the time of its production, she had already become a Keystone comedy staple, the impish ingenue having starred in 100-something shorts for Mack Sennett. This manic 13 minute short is made even more nonsensical by some missing footage at the head. But it’s a farce of miscommunication. Mabel has found her “ideal” man, a goofball hick (Charles Avery), while she fends off some of the smoother operators in town. At the same time Mabel’s father, the constable, is in love with the hick’s mother. The mother and the constable get stuck in a closet, and fear the gossip that will occur if they are discovered. These two strands smash together in a wood splintering finale that leaves the entire town chopping up their closeted secret. It’s a burst of energy as pure as the huckster Runaway Train ride.

Today, in one of the more creative thematic lineups this month, TCM celebrates (is that the right word?) divorce or, at least, shows a lot of movies that all have divorce as a common plot element.  Starting with The Divorcee at 6:00 a.m. and running through One is a Lonely Number at 6:15 p.m., it’s one divorce movie after another (with a brief respite at 8:00 for The Big Parade only to return to the theme with Street Scene and Stella Dallas).  And while some of the movies playing today (especially The Divorcee and Stella Dallas) are personal favorites, it got me thinking about other doomed relationships in the movies and how, many times, they can be downright fun.

To be clear, I’m decidedly not talking about tragic relationships, the kind where two people truly in love are kept apart (Romeo and Juliet) or let life and family get in the way (The Magnificent Ambersons) or they’re just too stupid to realize they need each other until it’s too late (Midnight Cowboy).  I’m talking about characters who make a good fit even if they don’t really get along and, ultimately, just can’t stay together for reasons of sanity.   I’m talking about relationships like Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh).  Has there ever been a couple so completely right and wrong for each other at the same time?

<From the first moment these two meet up (“Has the war started?”), Rhett’s already making fun of her.  He was on the couch while she and Ashley (Leslie Howard) had a tearful goodbye where he revealed that, essentially, she’s too much woman for him and he and Melanie probably make a lot more sense as a couple.  This is true because Ashley sdflkjasdas;glk [attempts to describe Ashley but falls asleep and smashes head on keyboard]… huh… wha… Oh, sorry about that.  So Ashley and Scarlett don’t mix well so why not hook up with Rhett?  It certainly makes sense from an entertainment point of view and, frankly my dear, if the two of them did work out, it would’ve been disappointing.

Maybe that’s what I mean by a fun doomed relationship; if they actually stay together, it kind of ruins the mood.

And this doesn’t just apply to romantic relationships.  It works just as well for platonic ones, too.  One of my favorite is Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) and Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten) in Citizen Kane.  One of them (Kane) is bigger than life, the other (Leland) is human scale and constantly whispering in Kane’s ear, “Remember, thou art mortal.”  The two are first presented as the best of friends but the relationship quickly sours.  In a scene where Kane writes down his declaration of principles, tellingly steeped in shadow, Leland won’t stop saying how much he wants a copy of that list when Kane’s done.  It’s small but powerful: Leland’s saying, “I’m holding you to this, whether you like it or not.” Later, when Leland starts, but doesn’t finish, a scathing review of Susan’s (Kane’s wife) operatic debut, Kane finishes it for him and then gives Leland the ultimate kiss-off: Leland approaches him and asks if they’re still talking, Kane replies, “Of course we’re still talking, Jedediah.  You’re fired.”  (eight years later, Cotten got to give the kiss-off in The Third Man by killing Welles in the sewer).

Back to married relationships, it’s hard to beat Sam (Walter Huston) and Fran (Ruth Chatterton) in Dodsworth, the extraordinary William Wyler film of 1936.  Sam is down to earth, hard working and no-nonsense.  Fran is not.  Sam accepts who she is and meets someone else who also accepts who she is and the two fall in love.  In the meantime, he’s got Fran who lies about her age and pursues younger men to feel younger.  Eventually, Sam’s had enough and, production code or not, tells her to shove off as he heads back to his true love (the one he’s not married to) and gives Ruth the shattering final line, “You’ll have to stop getting younger someday.”

Or how about another William Wyler movie, The Best Years of Our Lives?  That’s got one of my favorite doomed couples ever, Fred and Marie Derry, played by Dana Andrews and Virginia Mayo.  For all the qualities of the film and all the great aspects of the characterizations, the main reason I watch it when it’s on is for Virginia Mayo.  She’s hilariously transparent in her non-love for Fred, putting the poor man through misery before he finally decides, “To hell with it, I’m going to kiss Al’s daughter, Peggy.”  Favorite Mayo line:  When she and Peggy are headed to the restroom and see the word “Ladies” on the door, she says, “I just ignore the sign and go right in.”

I’d be remiss if I left out The Bride of Frankenstein which has one of the shortest lived and yet most awesomely failed relationships in the history of cinema:  That of the monster (Boris Karloff) and his “Bride” (Elsa Lanchester).  This is a relationship measured in minutes and narrated by grunts and screams.  It begins with the monster checking out his new bride, holding her hand, her screaming at him and him finally deciding, “Well, that’s it, I’m blowing up everything.”  This decision leaves the Bride hissing at him but also, in a brief moment of enticing deviousness, kind of excited too.  Yes, when the Bride gives that little smiling twitch at the end, as the monster’s about to destroy the castle, she seems to be saying, “Now that’s what I’m looking for, a bad boy.”  Unfortunately, the oafish monster doesn’t pick up on this, stop, and take her out for a night of terrorizing but, rather, goes through with the whole, “let’s blow up the castle plan.”  (for the curious, most old European castles had, as standard equipment, a lever in the basement that blew up the whole place)

There are quite a few more than that but that’s enough to get the idea across.    Doomed relationships in the movies often take on a somber tone.   True love is nipped in the bud and never given a chance to flower or tragic circumstances put a grim finality on the relationship.  But sometimes, the relationship is doomed in such a way that the audience can’t help but be delighted.  Heck, I wouldn’t have minded seeing a couple more movies where Virginia Mayo’s character blows through three or four more relationships or Ruth Chatterton trying to find some more younger men to string along.  Which reminds me, Alfie has one of the very best, between Alfie (Michael Caine) and Ruby (Shelley Winters).  When Alfie, who’s practically invites doomed relationships, finally starts to fall for Ruby, he shows up and she’s got another man in bed.  When Alfie asks what the new lover’s got that he doesn’t, she replies, “He’s younger than you are.”  Burn, baby, burn.

As regular readers may or may not know, one of my hobbies is doll collecting. While perusing some recent doll releases I came across photos of a couple of new dolls based on one of my favorite romantic comedies, BAREFOOT IN THE PARK (1967). The dolls are part of the Poppy Parker line produced by Integrity Toys, which has also created a number of other impressive dolls based on classic movies including BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961), SABRINA (1954), FUNNY FACE (1957), SUNSET BLVD. (1950) and MOMMIE DEAREST (1981). As both a doll collector and a classic movie fan I’ve been really impressed with the attention to detail that goes into these dolls so I decided to contact David Buttry, an acquaintance who works for Integrity Toys, and ask him a few questions about the company. I hope classic movies fans as well as fellow doll collectors will appreciate his answers and enjoy the accompanying photos.

Integrity doll designs based on BAREFOOT IN THE PARK (1967)

Movie Morlocks: BAREFOOT IN THE PARK is one of my favorite romantic comedies from the 1960s but I was surprised when I learned that Integrity had decided to design a doll line inspired by the film. How did the company come up with the idea?

David Buttry: We already had a licensing agreement in place with Paramount Pictures since we had previously produced dolls based on some of their other classic movies. We wanted to extend our relationship and it was a dream to see that BAREFOOT IN THE PARK was one of their properties. It’s one of my very favorite movies also, and I thought that the characters, especially Jane Fonda’s character of Corie Bratter, could be translated well into doll form.

Movie Morlocks: You were right! Jane Fonda’s wardrobe is amazing in the movie and I was really impressed by how detailed the Integrity reproductions are. Who was responsible for recreating Corie Bratter’s miniature wardrobe?

David Buttry: Thank you so much. I assisted our lead designer Vaughn Sawyers in interpreting the fashions in doll scale. We usually work as a team on our projects. Vaughn’s eye for detail and for clothing construction enables us to create such wonderful miniature replicas.

Movie Morlocks: Was it difficult process?

David Buttry: It took lots of research and lots of stopping and pausing the movie to make out the details [laugh]. Sometimes the studio had some reference material and other times we were left to our own devices and hoped we made the correct creative decisions. The most difficult part was sourcing the correct fabrics in the correct scale needed to get the look just right.

Integrity designs based on BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961), SABRINA (1954) & FUNNY FACE (1957)

Movie Morlocks: Can you tell me a little about Integrity and the current doll lines?

David Buttry: Integrity Toys was founded in 1995 by Percy Newsum and we soon became a force in the collectible fashion doll market. Integrity currently produces high end fashion dolls ranging from 12” to 16” and we have several different lines including our lead Fashion Royalty collection which focuses on interpretations of high end fashion and ready to wear, and our very popular Poppy Parker collection. In the Poppy Parker storyline she is a teenage fashion model in the 1960s, and because of the Poppy line we were already well versed in accurate fashions from the 60s, so that helped a great deal in interpreting the fashions for BAREFOOT IN THE PARK.

Movie Morlocks: What kind of responsibilities do you have at Integrity Toys?

David Buttry: I’m primarily a doll designer but I also do packaging and logos. I do everything from research to concepts and to product design. I’ve been with the company for eight years and have loved every minute of it.

Movie Morlocks: It’s obvious that Integrity Toys loves classic movies because you put a lot of thought and care into your products. I know that Integrity has released dolls based on BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961), SABRINA (1954), FUNNY FACE (1957), SUNSET BLVD. (1950) and recently MOMMIE DEAREST (1981). Are there any plans for more doll sets and fashions based on classic movies?

David Buttry: We do have a few new surprises on the horizon but, unfortunately, I can’t say what those are just yet. If you visit the Integrity Toys website or our Facebook page, you’ll be up to date on all of our new releases.

Movie Morlocks: The holidays are right around the corner and I’m sure some classic movie fans like myself are going to be adding these dolls to their wish list. Where can readers purchase Integrity dolls?

David Buttry: Our dolls are available through our official dealers and a lists of official dealers can be found on our website at integritytoys.com.

Integrity designs based on SUNSET BLVD. (1950) and MOMMIE DEAREST (1981)

Hope readers enjoyed this look at Integrity Toys and their amazing doll designs. Personally I would love to see the company produce dolls based on Paramount films such as VERTIGO (1958), DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) or ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER (1970) because I love the costume designs in all of those films. Have a favorite classic Paramount movie that you’d love to see Integrity tackle next? Feel free to share your ideas below!

Further reading & viewing:
- Integrity Toys Official Site
- Integrity Toys on Facebook

If you watch TCM regularly you’re probably aware that the classic movie channel is curating the upcoming event What Dreams Are Made Of: A Century of Movie Magic at Auction being organized by Bonhams. This highly anticipated auction is taking place November 25th in New York where interested bidders as well as curious film fans can also see a preview of the items on display beginning November 20th and running through November 25th. According to the official press release the auction features “a stunning array of costumes, props, scripts, production designs, production memos, movie posters and other rare treasures from some of the greatest films of all time.” And the crown jewel of the lot is the original falcon statue used in THE MALTESE FALCON (1945), which may fetch a hefty seven figure sum. And best of all? A portion of the auction proceeds will be going to The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization established by director Martin Scorsese to preserve and protect motion picture history.

My brother-in-law happens to work for Bonhams (a mere coincidence I should add) and he was kind enough to gift me with a copy of the auction catalogue, which is actually a beautiful keepsake that should appeal to a lot of classic film fans. The 167 page catalogue features an introduction from TCM host Robert Osborne and is divided into various sections focusing on film genres such as comedies, epics, musicals, dramas, westerns, science fiction, horror and film noir. Besides featuring full-color photos of each item up for auction, the catalogue’s also accompanied by detailed descriptions and there are lengthier articles offering further insight into director Preston Sturges, the work of Hollywood production artists and the making of THE MALTESE FALCON.

I occasionally collect film memorabilia myself so I was fascinated by the catalogue. Today I thought I’d highlight some of the unique items going up for auction that particularly intrigued me and piqued my curiosity. I have no personal or financial interests invested in this auction but as a classic film fan I’m fascinated by Hollywood history and hope many of the items eventually end up in a museum where they can be enjoyed by everyone and studied by appreciative film scholars.

Edith Head Studios costume sketch for Elvis Presley in FUN IN ACAPULCO (1963)

As a lifelong Elvis fan who’s fascinated with mid-century design and happens to love costume sketches this item hits a lot of my buttons. Designer Edith Head is probably best remembered today for creating stunning wardrobes for many of Hollywood’s most beloved actresses including Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Olivia de Havilland and Kim Novak but she was also responsible for dressing Elvis in some of best films such as KING CREOLE, BLUE HAWAII, ROUSTABOUT and FUN IN ACAPULCO. I love the minimal modern look of the sketch and it I”m sure it would look great framed and hanging on someone’s wall.

Bette Davis gown from THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX (1939)

Orry-Kelly designed the impressive costumes for Bette Davis in THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX and he did an amazing job of capturing the look and feel of Elizabethan England. If you love Bette Davis and enjoy historical epics as much as I do, it’s hard not to get excited by this period perfect gown.

1940 Buick Phaeton automobile from CASABLANCA (1942)

This beautifully designed automobile has the distinction of appearing in one of Hollywood’s most iconic films but CASABLANCA isn’t the only movie that featured this 1940 Buick Phaeton. The car was part of Warner’s fleet  and also appeared with Humphrey Bogart in HIGH SIERRA (1941). What Bogart fan wouldn’t like to have this beauty parked in their garage?

Original U.S. one sheet poster for REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

The first film poster I ever bought for myself was a reproduction of this iconic design for REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. I was just 12-years-old at the time but Nicolas Ray’s film made a profound impact on me when I first caught it playing on TV in the early ’80s and I developed a serious crush on James Dean. While other teenagers were busy covering their bedroom walls with the latest pop idols and new Hollywood stars, I was pining after ghosts. I’ve always wanted to get my hands on an original REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE poster so this item grabbed my attention.

Geza Kende portrait of Clara Bow owned by Bela Lugosi

Bela Lugosi met Clara Bow while touring with the stage production of DRACULA in 1927 and he was smitten with her. The two actors were rumored to have had a very short-lived romance but Lugosi never forget her and had this painting commissioned in her likeness. It’s believed that Bow didn’t actually pose for it but I like to think that she did. It’s a stunning portrait that hung in Lugosi’s study for years and the mystery and romance surrounding it only add to its undeniable appeal.

Errol Flynn pair of shorts from THE SEA HAWK (1940)

This ragged pair of shorts may not be the most glamorous item that Errol Flynn wore in THE SEA HAWK but that’s part of their appeal. According to the catalogue description, Flynn wears these shorts when he attacks his Spanish captors and takes over the galley. I appreciate the action associated with this simple costume but who needs another reason to love this item? These are shorts that were worn by Errol Flynn!

Steve McQueen jacket from LE MANS (1971)

I love Steve McQueen and LE MANS is one of McQueen’s most important films. My own lengthy appreciation of LE MANS can be found on the TCM website, which details the fascinating behind-the-scenes drama that happened during the making of the movie and briefly chronicles McQueen’s personal investment in the production. LE MANS was truly a labor of love for the iconic actor so the jacket has sentimental appeal as well as effortlessly cool ’70s style.

John Huston’s original typed & handwritten draft of THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE screenplay

John Huston’s one of my favorite directors and THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE is probably my favorite Huston film. As a would-be writer this truly unique and invaluable item is something I’d treasure if I ever got my paws on it. It also happens to be the only script that Huston won an Oscar for and it was the only film role that garnered his talented father (Walter Huston) an Oscar  as well so there’s lots of important Hollywood history tied to this screenplay.

Joan Crawford apron from MILDRED PIERCE (1945)

The auction will feature some glamorous dresses that were worn by Joan Crawford but I like this humble apron best because it reminds me of Crawford’s own working-class background. If I owned this apron I’d frame it and hang it my kitchen and anytime I made waffles or chicken (or better yet, waffles AND chicken!) I’d think of Joan Crawford.

Original U.S. one sheet poster for ANATOMY OF MURDER (1959)

The talented Saul Bass is one of Hollywood’s most renowned poster artists and this design for Otto Preminger’s ANATOMY OF MURDER is one of his best. Anyone who appreciates great mid-century design would probably love to have this framed and hanging in their home.

Life cast of Boris Karloff

There’s very little information available about this life cast of Boris Karloff but I love Karloff and I love the eerie look of life masks so this one naturally caught my eye. It reminds me of all the old photos of Boris getting slathered with make-up for his roles in films such as FRANKENSTEIN and THE MUMMY. Could it be the same life mask pictured with Karloff in the above photo? I have no idea but they sure look similar!

Erich Von Stroheim tuxedo jacket from SUNSET BLVD. (1950)

Billy Wilder’s dark satire remains one of the best critiques of the old Hollywood studio system, which made and destroyed countless careers and Erich Von Stroheim probably understood that better than anyone. As a struggling actor who eventually became a world renowned director only to end his carer as a bit part player in a number of Hollywood films, Von Stroheim had experienced the blinding glamor as well as dark underbelly of the City of Angels. Rumor has it that he wasn’t particularly happy about being cast as the enigmatic butler in SUNSET BLVD. but he took the role because he needed the money. At the time he was living in Paris and frustrated by the direction his career had taken. Von Stroheim’s jacket from SUNSET BLVD. is a touching reminder that all that glitters in Hollywood isn’t gold.

A Mia Farrow nightgown from ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968)

Out of all the costumes being auctioned off, I find this one particularly compelling. Probably because I love the movie but the simplicity of the delicate nightgown seems to scream out for attention amid the parade of lush period costumes featured in the auction catalogue. The item has a ghost-like quality that’s both spooky and beautiful, which manages to evoke the entire production design of Polanksi’s creepy classic thriller.

Can and cracker from SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

This SOYLENT GREEN prop might just be my favorite item in the whole catalouge. I will say that it’s the one item that instantly caught my eye and made me laugh out loud when I spotted it. If you’ve seen Richard O. Fleischer’s science fiction thriller you’re probably laughing right along with me. The film stars Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson who expose a terrible truth about the nations shrinking food supply, in particular the rations produced by the Soylent Corporation that are made of much more than just “high-energy plankton gathered from the ocean’s of the world.”

This is just a very small sampling of the incredible items from the upcoming What Dreams Are Made Of: A Century of Movie Magic Auction.If you’d like to learn more about the auction you can find a list of all the items being sold on Bonhams’ website. You can also download a PDF of the entire catalogue while you’re there or order a printed copy to display on your own coffee table. The auction catalogue is chock-full of fascinating items that should appeal to any classic film fan and even if you’re like me and can’t afford to bid on any of the items, you can still enjoy them from afar and appreciate their unique place in Hollywood history.

We all have our blind spots and this is especially true in pop culture, where the decision to interact with one piece, one work, one movie over another is often driven by the most superficial, vogue-related thinking. I know self-professed horror aficionados who have seen every slasher movie ever printed to celluloid but are spotty at best at anything pre-1950, even Universal classics. I know people who make horror movies who haven’t seen the essential Hammer titles. But I’m not here to cast aspersions (or spells). Life is short and you can’t see everything, though you can certainly die trying. This past week some of us on Facebook were passing around that Time Out poll on “100 Best Horror Films” (the pitch: “The average human can only take seeing 13 of these 100 horrific films. How many ghoulish movies have you seen?”) I was down for a respectable 94/100 but even some of my missed opportunities (erm… Ken Russell’s THE DEVILS. Nope, never seen it.) would be considered shameful by the elite of the horrorati. I mention all of this to say that I have added yet another brick to the wall of my cultural aesthetic this week, and one which wound up adding color and contour to my ongoing horror mosaic… I speak, you will be fascinated to know, of  TICKLE ME (1965)… the closest we will ever get to an Elvis-in-a-haunted-house movie. 

TICKLE ME is not one of Elvis’ better-remembered (or better-regarded) vehicles. If anyone recalls it at all, it is usually on the strength or weakness of that horrible title, which places it in our collective memory in the dubious company of HARUM SCARUM (1966) and CLAMBAKE (1967), or movies that get sniggered at primarily because of their titles. Being a casual Elvis fan (albeit more of his music than his movies), I’d certainly heard the title in the past but I never wanted to know any more than that. I was assigned this week to write a little about the film for Turner Classic Movies and five minutes of research made me want very badly to see it. On the far side of that desire, I’m here to tell you that TICKLE ME certainly delivers the goods, Elvis-wise. Skip the selection of scenes on YouTube and try to see the film on DVD, where it’s widescreen aspect ratio is preserved and its insanely vivid color cinematography is freakishly rich. (It doesn’t hurt that E. Presley looks throughout like a damned god.) It’s no wonder people flocked to see this back in 1965 – the combination of widescreen cinematography, full color, beautiful women, and the King of Rock and Roll was certainly worth the price of admission. Elvis made the film on the heels of ROUSTABOUT (1964) at Paramount and GIRL HAPPY (1964) at MGM and the occasion marked a one-off partnership with the failing/flailing independent Allied Artists (which had risen, Phoenix-like, out of the ashes of the old Poverty Row outfit Monogram Pictures in the mid-1950s). The deal was the brainstorm of Elvis’ handler and Dutch uncle, Colonel Tom Parker (real name: Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk), who brokered a deal with AA to get his client for one film, which would have the benefit of providing the studio with a potential box office bonanza while paying out to Presley a handsome fee. Elvis got $750,000 to star in TICKLE ME (more than half the film’s shooting budget) and a fifty percent share in the profits. The gamble paid off — the film was a huge hit and allowed Allied Artists to stave off receivership. 

It’s at this point, nearly 600 words in, that the horror fan will be asking “What’s in this for me?” In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that 90% of TICKLE ME looks like this – Elvis assing around a desert fat farm with a bunch of slimming starlets (among them THE HYPNOTIC EYE‘s Merry Anders). Though produced by Allied Artists, the film was shot at Paramount, where AA set up temporary offices. So it’s got a comfortably canned look to it, strictly soundstage and backlot. But it’s fun. Julie Adams (from THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON) plays Elvis’ boss, always trying to get him in the sack while he’s chasing fitness trainer Jocelyn Lane (THE GAMMA PEOPLE). At some point it comes up that Lane’s character, Pam Merritt, is in possession of a map pointing towards a purported fortune in gold, cached somewhere in a nearby ghost town. TICKLE ME takes an unexpected turn for the sinister as one masked man after another attempts to abscond with her.

No, it’s not an especially creepy moment but the use of the mask (even though it’s a cowpoke’s bandanna) evokes the Old Dark House thrillers of the silent and early sound era, such as THE BAT (1926), THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927), THE BAT WHISPERS (1930), and THE CAT CREEPS (1930), while the vivid chromatics certainly bring to mind Mario Bava’s related BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964), which also was set in an environment heavy with alluring women and concerned a certain something which the villains wanted very badly, bad enough to winnow the supporting cast down to almost nothing. Obviously, TICKLE ME is considerably lighter in tone. The kidnap attempt fails and the film decamps for its final act to that ghost town where the gold is supposedly hidden. Elvis’ itinerant bronco buster/guitar man Lonnie Beale and his sidekick Stanley (Jack Mullaney, who played Igor to Vincent Price’s mad scientist that same year in DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE, whose sequel, DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE GIRL BOMBS, was directed by Mario Bava — but I digress) follow Pam to the ghost town and the three settle in for, you guessed it, a dark and stormy night.

It’s at this point that you start to have fun imagining Elvis playing the Nick Adams role in DIE, MONSTER, DIE! (1965) or any number of full-on horror movies of this vintage? And why not? People would have gone to see them and how cool would it have been to pit the King of Rock and Roll against Boris Karloff, the King of Horror? (I’ll answer that for you: very cool.) But anyway. Lonnie and Pam bed down for the night (in separate rooms, of course) and all kinds of crazy Old Dark House stuff begins to happen, such as empty rocking chairs rocking themselves and sinister shadows appearing in ajar doors. Rain lashes at the window and lightning splits the sky.

It’s not a fit night out for man nor beast, but it’s not much better inside either. Troubled in her bed, Pam is heir to a time-honored Hollywood tradition of rudely awoken lady sleepers, whose company also includes Laura La Plante, Helen Twelvetrees, and Paulette Goddard (to name but a few). Meanwhile down the hall, Stanley is having a rough time of it…

It’s worth mentioning at this juncture that TICKLE ME was written by Edward Bernds and Ellwood Ullman. Both of these guys had resumes that stretched all the way back to the early talkies – in fact, Bernds’ boyhood fascination with ham radio ultimately won him work in the studios as a sound editor. Both Bernds and Ullman had past history with the Three Stooges and both had been involved in haunted house movies. Ullmann had cowritten the Olsen and Johnson vehicle GHOST CHASERS (1944) and penned the comedy shorts GHOST BUSTER (1952) and ONE SPOOKY NIGHT (1956) for RKO and Columbia, respectively. Ullman and Bernds collaborated on the script for THE BOWERY BOYS MEET THE MONSTERS (1954), with Bernds directing. By 1965, the team was well-equipped to do a haunted house comedy (Bernds would have preferred directing this, too, but he was outvoted by Elvis and Colonel Parker, who preferred their go-to guy, Norman Taurog) and TICKLE ME has all of that French farce style merry mix-up running around and opening and closing doors, combined with some classic Gothic face-at-the-window, clutching hand tropes of your haunted house-style comedy. I know what you’re thinking – everything but Francis the Talking Mule, right?

How cool would it have been if this mule had said, in Chill Will’s voice, “You’re all doooomed!”?

There is what I take to be a veiled PSYCHO (1960) reference in the bit where Lonnie and Stanley find a strange figure sitting in a rocking chair in a closet…

I can’t imagine what else would have inspired this, though of course my mind jumps ahead to the big reveal at the end of BURNT OFFERINGS (1976). Whatever the point, I would have found, as a kid, this bit incredibly creepy because the specter in the closet actually does nothing but look out… and then Elvis closes the door and they move on. It has such an unnerving negative capability that it stays with you longer than if the figure had actually jumped out and said “Boo!”

There’s something decidedly low tech about the spooks in this alleged haunted house. They wear obvious masks…

… which doesn’t entirely ameliorate their effectiveness — that is, if you’re a proper horror lifer and you have a proper open state of mind about these things. You can sit there in your loge seat and call out “Fake!” and have a bellylaugh but I think if we’re honest with ourselves we can admit that we would be properly spooked to come across someone where we expected to come across no one, even if they were wearing a patent dimestore monster mask. And isn’t this what contemporary horror movies like THE STRANGERS (2008) and “YOU’RE NEXT” (2011) are telling us, that there are no real monsters, that horror and terror are the product of real human beings, albeit ones who are able to override their humanity and plumb that which is atavistic and feral — if only for a weekend? That true horror isn’t the descent into the maelstrom but the banality of evil? Actually, those movies weren’t saying anything that, say, William Castle’s THE TINGLER didn’t broach fifty years earlier. And how about that corking opening scene of FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)? Masks are creepy, you don’t need me to tell you that.

By now you may well be asking: “What are you trying to tell us?” I only offer all of the above in the spirit of fun and out of a shared affection for horror, to whose, like me, are willing to step out of our comfort zones to see what fun stuff is out there, waiting for us to find it.

All this and a cameo by Allison ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN Hayes. She and Elvis died only six months apart back in 1977. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Once upon a time (1946), there was a movie (Two Smart People).  It was a modest, unassuming thing.  It was made on the cheap, and had no major stars (Lucille Ball and John Hodiak, supported by Elisha Cook Jr. and Lloyd Nolan).  It was greeted by dismissive critical drubbing (The New York Times called it a “dreadfully boring hodgepodge about love and the confidence racket” that “suffers from lack of competent direction.”  Ouch).  It dutifully sank into the purgatory reserved for forgotten cinema.  Subsequent surveys of film noir usually overlooked it, and even biographies of Lucy Ball felt no urge to linger over it.

And then, many decades later, the Warner Archive Collection hit upon a movie distribution business model that encouraged the commercial release of absolutely everything without regard to any expected sales figures.  And so in 2013 it’s easy to sit down with a lovely DVD of Two Smart People and assess it with clear unjaundiced eyes—whereupon you will discover that OMG this thing rocks.  Why, yes, yes it does.

I’ve written before about the curious phenomenon of stars like Lucy, or Jack Benny or Raymond Burr, whose TV careers were so towering they completely overshadowed the actors’ earlier cinema work.  In Lucy’s case, she had some reason to dismiss her pre-Lucy days: they were very frustrating for her.  Anytime we find an early Lucille Ball film that demonstrates what a talented actress she was, that only stings more—no matter how good she was in movies like this, she couldn’t break out to being a big star.

Ball had been typecast early on as the low-calorie Ginger Rogers substitute, and in that slot she was permanently mired in B-movie land.  Producers, critics, and audiences alike all assumed her presence in a movie signaled a lack of ambition.  Take Two Smart People as an example: as I quoted above, the NY Times sniffed that it “suffered from lack of competent direction.”  Well, it was directed by Jules Dassin and photographed by Karl Freund, and I’ll go out on a limb and say it is one of the best directed films of 1946.  It’s got a couple of flaws, sure, but the direction isn’t one of them.

Let’s imagine an alternate universe where the film was cast with marquee names—instead of John Hodiak let’s say Clark Gable and Ginger Rogers.  There’s no way a film starring the two of them would be so forgotten, regardless of its direction.  Even a lackluster programmer with two stars of that magnitude would manage to linger in the film historical consciousness to some degree, and probably rotate through the TCM schedule from time to time.

Replacing John Hodiak with Clark Gable could be an upgrade—there are no flies on Hodiak, and he’s certainly doing everything the script asks of him, but that’s it.  He does what the script asks, and no more.  What made the top stars the top stars was the extra oomph they brought—the way they imbued each performance with some extra element of charisma.

And this is what makes Lucille Ball such a revelation here—she is bringing so many additional inflections and undertones into her role beyond what the script needs on a literal level.  Replacing her with Ginger Rogers would not have been an upgrade—Ginger might certainly have brought some special magic of her own, but we’d have lost Lucy’s magic in the bargain.

To appreciate what Lucy is doing with this role, let me step back and lay out the premise: Lucille Ball and John Hodiak play professional con-artists who unwittingly try to swindle each other in the opening sequence.  It’s vaguely reminiscent of the opening scene of Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, where two crooks fall in love trying to rob each other.  Ball and Hodiak are instantly smitten with the cleverness, quick-witted improvisation, and utter amorality of the other.  As Lucy says, “We’ll always have larceny.”

The one thing standing in the way of this legendary love affair is that Hodiak is a wanted man.  He stole a fortune in bonds, and has been pursued cross-country by a dogged lawman (Lloyd Nolan).  Nolan finally catches up with him—only to have Hodiak reveal that he’s struck a plea bargain with the prosecutors and is on his way to deliver himself into their custody to begin a five year prison term.  There’s no point chasing him any more, he’s done gone caught himself.

(It’s crucial to note here that the terms of Hodiak’s deal is that he’s surrendered himself and pled guilty, not that he’s returned the money.  The money remains at large—and Hodiak is banking on the idea that if he can keep it hidden he can serve his five year sentence and then be released, a free man, to enjoy his wealth without fear of further prosecution).

But just because he has a date with the NY prosecutor doesn’t mean he can’t have fun along the way.  Hodiak plans to take the longest possible route to New York, to see the sights and soak up his last few days of freedom.  Sort of a Bachelor’s Party for a man who isn’t getting married but is literally donning a ball and chain.

And here’s where Two Smart People throws its first unexpected curveball: Hodiak invites the cop to join him, as his friend, and offers to pay his way.   Hodiak has developed a respect for and friendship with Nolan during their long chase, and genuinely wants his companionship on his final journey.   Well, either that or it’s one of those “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” kind of strategies.

And Nolan accepts, because he’s come to admire Hodiak and enjoy his company too.  That, or Nolan is still hoping to figure out where the bonds are hidden.

And this is the key to how the movie functions, and why it’s film noir.  There is a surface of emotional connections, honesty, and integrity that hold these characters together—but it is layered over an understructure of deceit and self-interest.  The events leading up to the finale make the same amount of sense if we assume that these two are actually friends as if we assume each one is playing the other.  In fact, the movie makes the most sense if we accept that both are true.  The question as we head into the finale is, which set of motivations is the stronger?  When push comes to shove, which will win out—the friendship or the game?  And will both men choose the same way?

It’s time to bring Lucille Ball back into this, because the same dynamic is at work with her.  She is also after the bonds, and getting close to Hodiak is the best way to figure out where they are hidden.  She is a professional crook, whose livelihood depends on being a convincing liar.  So her love affair with Hodiak is also inflected with that is it?/isn’t it? ambiguity.

For the storytelling to work, she needs to be minimally convincing as a love interest, and with just a hint of icy femme fatale distance, to keep that ambiguity present in the audience’s mind.  Except, of course, while that would almost certainly be the way anyone else would paly the role, it’s not entirely realistic—because every hint of deception that would appear in the performance would presumably be a red flag to Hodiak.

So Ball plays it for real: in her scenes with Hodiak she is fully committed to being moon-eyed in love.  But in scenes with other characters, she switches modes to be what they expect her to be.  She just keeps changing the tone of her performance based on the co-stars of any given scene—which is exactly how a person like her character would have to be.  She shows a different mask in every scene, and there’s no way to know (until the end) which one is her real face.

This is much more interesting—instead of a love interest who isn’t entirely convincing and may be a threat, we have a person who is at once completely convincing as a love interest and as a threat, but at different times.

There are numerous moments where Ball invokes some of the tics and mannerisms  that would come to be familiar stock-in-trade material from I Love Lucy, but used here in a dramatic context.  Those comedy moments are so humanizing, so endearing—and it just upstages her more robotic costar John Hodiak all the more.

For most of its running time, the film is a road movie of sorts—the three main characters make their serpentine journey towards New York (by way of Mexico, and New Orleans, because, you know, why go in a straight line when prison’s at the other end?).  This enables the film to have a slightly more epic feel, as it reinvents itself repeatedly every time the setting changes.

They arrive in New Orleans on Mardi Gras, partly because every day is Mardi Gras in movieland’s view of New Orleans, and partly because Jules Dassin and Karl Freund have an absolute field day turning the opulent excess of Mardi Gras into a nightmare landscape for the finale to play out.  The celebrations turn from merely weird to chillingly alien, as the situation is forced into a resolution.

There is no good reason for a film this lively and inventive to stay forgotten.  That it was overlooked in 1946 was a mistake—but it’s in our power to correct that mistake.

In case you missed it, one of the best action thrillers of the seventies aired at 3:45 a.m., EST, on TCM.  The movie is The Slams and it stars Jim Brown as a character trying to get out of the slams (prison) and back onto the streets where he can get a hold of the money he was cheated out of in a double-cross.  It just so happens I wrote up The Slams for TCM a couple of years ago (you can read the article here) and will take any opportunity I can to promote it again.  As I wrote at the time, “The Slams is damn good but doesn’t get the kind of attention it should because most folks write it off, sight unseen, as an exploitation film, a term used too many times to dismiss exceptional movies made on low-budgets with niche appeal.”  I read that again and started thinking about how many movies released to little or no fanfare have become personal favorites over the years.

The fact is, when it comes to a movie’s success, I want it both ways.  I want the movies I like to have so little audience interest that I’m the only one in the theater but, at the same time, I want the movies to be successful enough that movies like them keep getting made.  It’s a ridiculous idea but I’ve found a good compromise over the years:  seeing matinees.  Matinees usually afford me the opportunity to have a theater to myself, or at the very least, among so few people that it feels like it.  But even big-budget, hugely successful movies can have a small audience at any given matinee.  What really appeals to me is the movie that never succeeded, either at the matinee or the Friday night showing, but is wildly entertaining nonetheless.  The kind of movie, like The Slams, where one wonders, “Why wasn’t this successful?”  In addition to The Slams, I’d like to offer up three titles that did little to no business at the box office and likewise had no surge in popularity on tv, cable or video/dvd/streaming in the years since.

First up is one of my all time favorites in this category, the Albert Brooks 1979 mini-masterpiece, Real Life.  I watched it again for the fourth or fifth time last year and, again, couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t more famous.  The movie is an early mockumentary (spoofing a then well known television documentary, An American Family) made at a time when, outside of Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run, mockumentaries were hard to come by.   Albert Brooks plays a fictionalized version of himself setting out to document the life of one American family, the Yeagers, headed up by Warren Yeager, played by Charles Grodin.  The first quarter of the movie shows the family audition process and the hilarious rationale for why they chose one family over another.  It also contains this absurd quote, spoken to the camera by Brooks in an effort to impress the audience with how exhaustive the family testing was:  ”If these tests could be converted into eggs, it would be enough to feed a city the size of St. Louis for more than two years on a two-egg-per-person per week basis. Sound complicated ? lt was, and very expensive.”  Maybe I’m crazy but there’s something really wonderful about not only converting the man hours into egg consumption but then limiting that consumption to two eggs per person per week to stretch it out to two years.  The movie is filled with moments like that, including the wonderful explanation of the special cameras they use (“Only six of these cameras were ever made. Only five of them ever worked. We have four of those.”).  Really, Real Life is a low box office champ.

Next up is The Love Goddesses, a 1965 documentary that is fortunately available through Criterion.   The Love Goddesses is old school documentary.  The kind where there are no talking heads or interviews, just clips and a narrator.  And I love it.   I love it because it contains wonderful clips from beginning to end, the kind that are increasingly relegated to one or two second shots near the beginning of the annual Oscar ceremony montages that now do their best to cram everything from before 1990 into the first 10 seconds of a three minute montage.   I used to love the Oscar ceremony montages but they’ve become quite dull in recent years.  Anything classic gets a quick nod by using its most famous scene (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” “I coulda been a contender,” “You talkin’ to me?” etc) before they get around to all the clips from movies from the last twenty five years with a focus on the last ten.  But The Love Goddesses, a documentary about all the great goddesses of cinema, from Theda Bara to Marilyn Monroe, has clips that don’t get shown anymore and the clips from the Mae West section alone are worth the price of admission.

Finally, I present Chase a Crooked Shadow, with Anne Baxter, Richard Todd and Herbert Lom.  It’s a nice little mystery thriller that has one of those great title cards before the closing credits pleading with the audience not to reveal the twist at the end of the movie.  Unfortunately, the secret seems to have been kept a little too well as it never turned out to be the hit the producers expected.   The story starts with Kimberly Prescott (Anne Baxter) getting a visit from her brother, Ward (Richard Todd) at her Costa Brava villa one night, unexpectedly.  The problem?  Her brother died in a car accident two years prior.  But this isn’t some “he’s back from the dead” story.  Oh no.  The problem that Kimberly immediately encounters is that everyone agrees that Ward never died at all.  Car accident?  Never happened.  She goes to the police to get this brother impostor out of her life but everything they check out says her brother never died in a car accident at all and that that’s him.  She even gets their uncle, played by Alexander Knox, to come to Spain to tell them all her brother died but, instead, he takes one look at Ward and says, “Yep, that’s him.  By the way, what are you talking about?  Ward never died in any accident.”   Suffice it to say, she begins to suspect she’s going crazy.  But is she?  It’s a great thriller that had great black and white photography along the coast of Costa Brava and a satisfying finish to a suspenseful mystery.

Sometimes, a movie that is relatively unknown or unheralded is unknown or unheralded for a reason: It stinks.  But a lot of the time, it simply gets lost in the noise of everything else coming out.  From Hollywood alone, hundreds of movies get released every year and there are always a few small ones that pass by unnoticed that bring great pleasure to those who discover them.   I hope many more get listed in the comments because when it comes to the movies, discovery’s always a good thing.

This could be the title of my autobiography, since I do not cook for anyone—not even myself. But, it is really the title of a minor screwball comedy. Released in 1935, just a year after It Happened One Night launched the subgenre dubbed screwball, If You Could Only Cook stars Jean Arthur and Herbert Marshall as the mismatched couple destined to be together. The film airs on TCM this Friday night, November 15, at 4:45am.

To be honest, this is not a long-lost gem that will rival classics like It Happened One Night, Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, or other films that defined the genre.  I did not feel it was special to recommend it as one of my “Forgotten Films to Remember.” The script lacks the fast-paced dialogue and snappy comebacks associated with screwball, the supporting characters are not zany enough, and the actual screwball situations are few and far between. But, the film provides a good example of how the systems and practices of the Golden Age could elevate the most mediocre of material, and I found myself admiring If You Could Only Cook for that reason.

JOAN WINS OVER HER EMPLOYERS (LEO CARRILLO AND LIONEL STANDER) WITH HER SAUCE.

Herbert Marshall stars as James Buchanan, the wealthy, successful head of an automobile company who is about to wed snooty Evelyn Fletcher, because it is “a logical marriage.” His gnawing ambivalence about his upcoming nuptials is magnified by professional disappointment when his board of directors refuses his designs for next year’s cars. He departs for a short vacation, but ends up on a park bench with unemployed Joan Hawthorne. Jean Arthur costars as Joan Hawthorne, an ordinary gal desperately looking for a job in the want ads. Because it is the Depression, and James is on a park bench in the middle of the day, Joan assumes that he is out of work, too. When she finds an ad for a husband/wife team of butler and cook in a ritzy section of town, she suggests the two of them pretend to be married and apply.  Joan wins over the employer—a bootlegger named Mike Rossini—because she knows the proper way to cook with garlic, and the two get the jobs.

JAMES’S CAR DESIGNS ARE TOO “WILD” FOR HIS BOARD.

The screwball situations that spark comedy include Joan and James’s living arrangements. Because Rossini thinks the two are married, they are given quarters together above the garage, which is awkward since they have just met. Later, when Joan discovers James’s true identity, she never wants to see him again, prompting Mr. Rossini to play matchmaker with the help of his tough-talking partner, Flash.

Part of the success of screwball comedies is the way they make use of the star system, which is an approach to Hollywood storytelling that is getting lost over time. Most movie lovers know that Hollywood stars from the Golden Age had images or personas that were consistent from film to film. A star’s image was partly based on fantasy and partly based on the star’s own personality. Viewers of all ages during the Golden Age became familiar with stars’ images relatively quickly because they went to the movies weekly, or even bi-weekly. Stars were the bait to lure audiences to the movies, and they became the primary reason for viewers’ loyal attendance. The star system was much more than celebrity worship; it was a storytelling system used to create characters and drive storylines. Scripts were written with stars’ images in mind; in other words, characters were empty shells until the stars stepped into the roles and flushed them out. Stars did not lose themselves in their characters, which is a trait today’s reviewers consider the hallmark of good acting. Instead, the characters were defined by the images of the stars. Good performances were judged by how well a star played into facets of his or her star image to satisfy the expectations of the fans without embodying the exact character in film after film.

INTERESTINGLY, JAMES’S DESIGNS ARE CLOSE TO AN ACTUAL CAR KNOWN AS THE DELAHAYE.

Just how well that star system worked is revealed when stars managed to create larger-than-life characters in movies with weak, slight scripts. They could turn a mediocre film into an entertaining viewing experience.  Jean Arthur and Herbert Marshall breathe life into Joan Hawthorne and James Buchanan in If You Could Only Cook, though their characters lack back stories and description.  Arthur’s vivaciousness can enliven any character, but recently while watching If You Could Only Cook, I was struck by the casual charisma of Herbert Marshall, a star who seems forgotten compared to such Golden Age stalwarts as Wayne, Grant, Stewart, Mitchum, and Fonda.  Marshall specialized in urbane sophisticates who were mature, cultured, and refined. Superficial bios of Marshall claim that he was “the ideal romantic lead,” but I don’t agree. Stardom aside, Marshall was not a physically attractive man. He had a too-round face, a high forehead with a receding hairline, and a tall but shapeless build. He lost a leg during WWI, and his wooden replacement caused him considerable discomfort, limiting his movements during a performance.  Marshall did make a wonderful romantic lead, however, though it was not contingent on his physical looks. Instead, he exhibited considerable charisma and charm, which were communicated through a finely modulated voice and smooth line delivery.  The character James Buchanan is shown in only two scenes before he sits down next to Joan in the park, but there is no doubt that she is in safe hands despite asking a complete stranger to pretend to be her husband. Any potential threat or risk does not even cross the minds of viewers familiar with Marshall because ungallant behavior does not match his star image as the consummate gentleman.

PERUSING THE WANT ADS FOR A JOB.

Marshall could play opposite anyone and exhibit chemistry or camaraderie. One of the film’s best scenes finds James taking lessons from his butler, Jennings, on how to be a good servant or valet. A bit actor named Romaine Callender played Jennings, and his exchange with Marshall is humorous because of the physical and verbal interplay between them.  James learns butlering skills from Jennings by repeatedly asking him to come through the door so he can practice taking his coat and hat, while the latter advises James to pretend to “hang onto” his boss’s every word even when it is “drivel.” As with most of his leading ladies, Marshall worked well with spunky Jean Arthur. His civil and suave exterior balanced her bubbly personality, just like his smooth, dulcet tones complemented her raspy voice. He even exhibited charisma opposite costars Leo Carrillo and Lionel Stander, who played the nouveaux riche bootleggers.

I DON’T KNOW IF THIS PUBLICITY PHOTO WAS EVER USED, BUT I FOUND IT CREEPY. ARTHUR IS OVER THE KNEE OF DIRECTOR WM. SEITER.

One of the conventions of screwball comedies is the clever use of zany secondary characters. Unfortunately, there are too few in If You Could Only Cook, though Stander is memorable as the henchman Flash. I remember the gravelly voiced Stander as the chauffeur on the television series Hart to Hart during the 1980s. At the time, much was made of Stander’s return to America after several years working as a character actor in Europe. In the 1960s, he had to re-establish his career in Europe after falling victim to the HUAC witch hunts of the 1950s, which resulted in his blacklisting from film, television, and radio. Stander had just begun his Hollywood career when he appeared in If You Could Only Cook, but his voice was already so gruff and croaky that it is immediately recognizable. That voice adds to the humor of a scene near the end when he and another gangster pretend to be a lovey-dovey couple sitting in their honeymoon car in order to avoid detection by the police. Nothing in a classic Hollywood film is ever wasted—not even an opportunity to exploit a character actor’s unique voice.

Movie stars are still a part of the film industry, but their star images are not cultivated and controlled like they were in previous eras. Consequently, they are not used with the same deliberateness and effectiveness as they were in the Golden Age. Those viewers who tend to lump movie stars in the same category as celebrities don’t appreciate the function of stars like audiences of the past, while fewer directors are clever with their casting. The young demographic that Hollywood prizes so much cares more about recognizable characters (that is, comic book and graphic novel characters) than the stars who play them. With the commercial film industry unraveling because of the high costs of its simple-minded blockbusters and franchises, which are long on CGI but short on character and story, modern movies have lost their identity as the art of the people.

Today’s filmmakers and studio heads could learn a lot from If You Could Only Cook.

“It didn’t take those women at the stage door to convince me I was nobody’s hero. I’d looked into a mirror once or twice. These light eyes, these limp features, these scars all over my face!”

-Lee Tracy, Picture Play Magazine, 1933

Although his career lasted until 1965, the image of Lee Tracy will forever be of a chatterbox on the make, established during his prolific run of pre-codes in the early 1930s. Whether he plays a tabloid reporter or ambulance chasing lawyer, Tracy’s characters were always looking for an angle as sharp as the crease in his fedora. His catalytic personality, a shotgun blast of nasal putdowns, led him to leading man roles, overcoming the perceived shortcomings of his pockmarked face, thinning hair and bantamweight build. Audiences, though, liked to root for this ruthless underdog. The Warner Archive released three Tracy pre-codes on DVD last week: The Half Naked Truth (’32) , Turn Back The Clock (’33) and The Nuisance (’33). In The Half Naked Truth, Tracy is a con-man/publicist as he turns hoochie coochie dancer Lupe Velez into a Broadway star. A hidden gem directed by Gregory La Cava, I wrote about it last year. So today I’ll focus on the latter two. He is cast against type in Turn Black the Clock, a proto It’s A Wonderful Life where his meek tobacconist is granted a time-traveling chance to re-live his life for money instead of love. The Nuisance, though, is a prime rat-a-tat Tracy, in which he hammers the local train company with phony injury claims, with the aid of his drunken doctor pal Frank Morgan. Cinematographer Gregg Toland and director Jack Conway make sure the camera moves with as much agility as Tracy’s tongue.

Tracy was born in Atlanta on April 14th, 1898, but moved from town to town because of  his father’s job as a railroad superintendent. He graduated from the Western Military Academy in 1918, and served as an officer in WWI. Despite his training in electrical engineering, he was drawn to the stage, and got his first job in a vaudeville skit for $35 a week. He gained notoreity on Broadway with his fast-paced performance in the aptly titled 1924 production of The Showoff. He was also the first to play Hildy Johnson on stage in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s smash hit The Front Page (1928). He was passed over for Pat O’Brien for the film version, but he had caught the eye of Hollywood casting directors and began his film career in earnest in 1929, with the fortuitous coming of sound. 

His adenoidal patter, which he modulated into a high-pitched whinny when agitated, was ideal for the early days of sound, in which cameras were often static. When Tracy talked, the whole film seemed to move along with it. Turn Back the Clock (’33) needed his assistance. Shot in unvarying static two shots, it’s boring to look at, but Tracy always manages to keep things interesting, with his active hands punctuating his anxieties. The story taps into Depression-era traumas, of the second-guessing that gutted those millions have families who lost their nest egg. Tracy plays a struggling tobacconist who bemoans dumping his rich high school girlfriend for his poor, loving wife. After a conk on the head, he gets his wish, waking up a decade earlier when the fateful decision was made. Now he gets to live his whole life over – and opts for easy money over love. This past also includes an early appearance by The Three Stooges, so maybe all that time-travel was worth it. It is a romantic film, and pushes Tracy into moments of rare vulnerability. Where his most famous work puts him on the attack, here he is a defensive second-guesser, utilizing his motormouth comebacks to squabble with his wife rather than swindle capitalists. Re-framed in this context, Tracy’s whole schtick becomes small and petty – and the film’s conclusion builds to the stripping away of his arrogant veneer.

But that sneering veneer is why I love him, so I gained far more pleasure from The Nuisance, in which Tracy is back in motormouth conman mode. As shady lawyer J. Phineas Stevens, he’s not an ambulance chaser, but more of a sprinter. He has his own ambulance to cut through traffic in order to beat the real ones to the scene, to kindly drop his business card into the prone victims’ hands. Tracy’s publicists were clearly trying to pump up Tracy’s sex appeal through “dangerous” roles like this one. In a 1933 Picture Play, the writer Helen Klumph recounts this inconceivable anecdote of neighborhood girls with a crush on Tracy:

“I thought Clark Gable and Roman Novarro and Robert Montgomery were your type.”  ”Mamma likes them”, one girl spoke up as the others nodded in agreement. “I do sometimes, but they’re sticky”, another added. “Too intense”, another chimed in. “They talk like crooners. We like jazz.” In other words…they adore Lee Tracy because their parents don’t approve.

Klumph’s article is accompanied with this photo of a beaming Tracy – not exactly James Dean material here. Although a world in which Lee Tracy is a heartthrob is one I want to live in:

I digress. In The Nuisance Tracy’s main target is the city’s train company, whom he’s soaked for millions in phony personal injury claims. His dipsomaniac doctor, played with brittle brilliance by Frank Morgan, fakes x-rays for every injury in the book, though his favorite is spinal thrombosis.Further aided in his crimes by Floppy (Charles Butterworth), an expert at taking dives in front of cars, Stevens can practically write his own check after any fender bender in town. That’s until Dorothy (Madge Evans) is sicced on him by the District Attorney to smell out his schemes. And with her gams he gives up the trade secrets quick.

The Nuisance is aided by the highly mobile camerawork of Gregg Toland, who snakes through Stevens’ office to capture Tracy speaking in unbroken takes. Toland and director Jack Arnold also build a simple but compelling arc out of Stevens bending over his prone victims. In the beginning it is pure business, forcing dazed commuters into his schemes. In the next composition it is personal, with Stevens looming over Dorothy’s body, hoping to score a date. But in the third variation, he and Dorothy tilt over the Doctor’s prone frame after a car accident. It’s the same basic setup, but Tracy inches closer towards the victim each time, conveying the increasing emotional cost of his lifestyle. After the usual madcap series of twists and revelations, Stevens and Dorothy end up in each other’s arms – as he promises her he’ll go straight. But then Floppy takes a dive, Lee Tracy’s eyes light up, and he says that this will be his last scam – an unbelievable lie. But Dorothy has to shrug and accept it, and his audience hopes his new swindle will hit screens soon.

Years ago, the Uptown Theater in Washington, DC, ran a movie that flopped completely.  It was Julia Roberts’ Dying Young and, as tempting as it may be, I won’t go for the obvious pun as to its fate.  The Uptown Theater was, and still is, one of the few remaining movie palaces in the country.  Back then (and perhaps still today), when it booked a movie, that was it.  If the movie died young (dammit, see, I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist), and they had booked it for three months, well, they were out of luck. Either show it every night to dwindling or non-existent audiences or go to Plan B.  The Uptown went to Plan B.  What was Plan B?  Take every old print of every classic they had in storage and show them for three months instead.  It was the best three months of movie-going I’d ever had up to that point.  I saw everything from Bridge on the River Kwai to Blade Runner on the biggest screen in town and it was great.  But did it really make that much of a difference?

Now, let’s be clear.  I don’t mean the difference between seeing Blade Runner on a television or seeing it in a theater.  I mean the difference between seeing it on a massive screen or seeing it on an average sized multiplex screen.   I bring all of this up because the latest edition of The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which aired on Monday night, covers, briefly, the rise of the multiplex, a cultural event often frowned upon by cinema purists.   But I think that frowning upon has a lot more to do with the quality of movies being shown in multiplexes, and their sometimes obnoxious audiences, than with the size of the screen itself.  Those complaints lamenting the passing of the massive palace screen seem a little misplaced to me.

Let’s go back to the Uptown Theater in 1991.  I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey there after having seen it five or six times on a tv screen first.  In the case of 2001, the difference was jarring.  It was like seeing the movie for the first time and I felt like all those tv viewings had been only a tease to this, my first real viewing of the movie.  Blade Runner, on the other hand, didn’t feel special at all.   I’d seen it before in a theater when it was released and I was ready to be doubly wowed this time around.  Instead, I found myself thinking, “eh, that was about how it felt the first time around.”  That is to say, having seen it on a multiplex screen several years prior did not feel considerably different than seeing it on a more massive screen later.  The difference simply wasn’t big enough.

The Bridge on the River Kwai, however, was just like 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I’d only ever watched it in pan and scan on a small tv screen so seeing it on the big screen was an incredible experience.

And so it went.

Movies I’d seen only on the small screen felt transformative while movies I’d previously seen in a multiplex seemed about the same.  Through time, another thing happened, too.  My memory of a screening would omit the size of the screen and recall only the thrill of watching the movie.   Allow me to explain.

I now see dozens of classic movies a year at the AFI Theater in Silver Spring, MD so the 1991 Uptown Theater experience isn’t as unique anymore.  Now I get to see all kinds of great movies from all over the world on the big screen but not always the biggest screen.  You see, the AFI has three screens.  One of them, the central screen, is huge.  It’s a movie palace size screen, occupying the original theater space from the thirties and absolutely deluxe in every way.  On the other side, though, they’ve installed two small screens to handle more movies for more customers.  The screens are maybe –  maybe – half the size of the main screen and yet, many a time I’ve mis-remembered which screen I saw a movie on there.   I’ve mentioned seeing a certain movie on the big screen only to be reminded by my wife, who has an astonishing recall for details, by the way, that we saw it on one of the smaller screens.  The thing is, a smaller movie screen is still a huge damn screen.  A lot bigger than any television you’re going to get.

Seeing a movie on a big screen is great but at a certain point, the screen is big enough and, I wonder, how much bigger does it need to get (Jake Gittes might ask, “How much better can you see?”).  I’ve seen a couple of IMAX movies in the last two years and despite the majesty of the screen size, I remember my experience seeing The Big Sleep on a small screen at the AFI with much more fondness (yes, my wife confirms, it was the small screen).  And not because the movie was better (it was) but the because the experience was better.  Seeing The Big Sleep on a smaller big screen in a packed theater made the whole experience feel more intimate.   Maybe it’s all the rain in the movie, forcing everyone to rush into bookstores and cabins, that made the whole thing so cozy.  I don’t know.  I do know that it was better than watching it on tv but I doubt it would have been better on a massive screen like the Uptown Theater’s.  In fact, I think it would have been worse. In my opinion, having seen classic black and white, Academy ratio movies on both the big screen and the “small” big screens at the AFI, the experiences on the “small” screen are usually better.  It’s grand and intimate all at once.   As for modern movies, the feeling’s about the same but for some epic productions, or pure special effects spectacles, I can see how the massive screen is better.

The point is, I suppose, is that I don’t lament the smaller big screens of the multiplex.  Yes, it bothers me that a theater has all those screens and still manages to waste five of them on the same movie shown at staggered times.  But the size of the screen doesn’t bother me at all.  I love movie palaces like the Uptown Theater and the AFI Silver’s main theater but the multiplex small screens allow for more people to have the experience of seeing a movie on the big screen instead of only on a television screen.   And that’s a good thing.  I don’t want the movie palaces go away but I don’t expect many (or any) new ones to pop up.  And that’s not all for the bad.